


Love is a Shambling Thing

by davepetasprite



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Asexual John Egbert, Beta ot4 is endgame but I'll add pairings as they appear, Blatant Disregard for Iambic Pentameter, Bro Strider is fucking dead dude he's gone, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Much like Hiveswap, Multi, Parallels to canon, Polyamory, References to Past Child Abuse, Timeline where the Sburb Beta was Never Released, Trans Dave Strider, Trans Jade Harley, Trans Roxy Lalonde, Underage Drinking, i'm so sorry honestly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-10-14 00:37:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10525248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davepetasprite/pseuds/davepetasprite
Summary: Four kids who can't choose until they realise they don't have to.





	1. there's something behind your ear, and it's not a coin (if that's what you were thinking)

**Author's Note:**

> so recently someone punched me in the face with beta ot4-engraved knuckledusters and i started working on this monstrosity because i've read every damn fic in the tag and i'm?? dying
> 
> so. here you go, modest population of beta ot4 shippers. i'll see yall in heck

It begins, as it always does, on John’s birthday. The four of them are crowded together on his bed, Jade spilling off onto the floor and Dave crushed into the corner by John and Rose. The walls of his room suddenly feel too small to hold such a rambunctious load of teens between them, and the spring air is unseasonably warm; the hyperblue icing decals on the cake Rose digs into is slowly melting down the sides. Dave chases a droplet with his finger before licking it off in the face of a thoroughly disgusted John.

"Aw, come on Dave! That's so nasty," he says, sticking out his tongue and doing a delightful impression of a child spitting out something they'd expected to taste better than a fresh slice of ass.

"I thought you moved on from your saccharophobia," says Rose as she licks half-melted icing and rich purple lipstick off her fork. "Unless it simply manifested into an overarching fragapane phobia?"

"My wha—actually, never mind! Man, Rose, do I have to have some sort of phobia thing to just not like watching my best bro lick gross icing off his fingers?"

"Not necessarily, but it would be more interesting," she says, and Dave snorts.

"Okay that's about enough, time for Doctor Professor Tentacle Therapist to take the back foot in this birthday jig and let normal human Rose take the stand," he says, before scooping another dent in the white frosting. "Even if John's goddamn stellar mental health is being called into question again, on account of being grossed out by god's gift to hyperactive kids and dentists everywhere."

"Oh god, why are you bringing up dentists _and_ cake _and_ psycho analysis on my birthday?" John groans, and Jade swings her legs off the bed and sits up on the floor to reach up and impatiently jostle the small box in his lap.

"Stop giving them more silly psych 101 material to work with and just open my present, John!" she says.

"Oh yeah." John laughs, and turns back to the messily-wrapped box. He tugs the dark green bow from the top, lime green inverse flashing, and tosses it to the side, where Dave nabs it a split second before Rose can. John doesn't bother trying to figure out what nefarious use the bow's gonna go to, but he can guess it'll just be something silly like Dave tying it onto Rose's butt while she isn't looking or wearing it himself like a jaunty hat. Maybe he'll find some way to embed it in Jade's tangled mass of hair when she's asleep—who knows! John doesn't, so instead he focuses on trying to rip open the portions of wrapping paper that aren't haphazardly covered with brightly coloured duct tape.

"Jegus, Jade," says Dave, before he frowns and his speech falters. Rose looks at him carefully, expression like the closed petals of a flower; guarded and difficult to parse, and also potentially hiding some kind of many-legged insect in its depths. He returns the look for a moment behind the safety of his shades before his eyes dart back to the box, and then the moment appears to be firmly over.

"I mean, _Jesus_ Jade—did ya have to seal that shit up tighter than Fort Knox? If you didn't want John getting to his present you should'a just bought him a lockbox and thrown away the key."

"It would've gone quite nicely with the large safe you have downstairs," adds Rose.

"No, no, it's cool! I got it," John says as his fingers finally find a fault line of delicate, bright blue paper between mountainous ranges of tape, and he shucks the entire papery eyesore directly onto the floor where it belongs. Jade snatches it up and balls it into a vaguely spherical amalgamate of fluro tape and eye-searingly bright paper before lining up a shot into the overflowing bin beside John's desk. The four of them yell "Kobe!" in unison as the unholy high-vis ball bounces neatly through a recently-installed plastic basketball hoop and skitters off the crumpled papers in the bin below.

"I guess it's a good thing I opened your present before Jade's, huh Dave?" John says to him, and Dave nods.

"Yeah and we all got to sit here and watch its christening together. I'm so proud," he finishes in a whisper, and wipes away a tear whose bullshit attribute is likely only rivalled by that of its creator. Rose smiles behind her hand at the sight of icing smearing across his cheek from cake-covered fingers, a bright white streak over light brown.

"I would have to argue that rather than its christening, we all stood witness to your hoop child's sudden deflowering," she says, and Dave and John both groan. "Jade, how do you feel about having taken the virginity of your cousin's cheap plastic sports baby?"

"Hey now, I take offense to that—"

"Felt pretty good to me, Rose!" says Jade around a bright grin.

"—that right there's a piece of limited edition Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff merch, fully authenticated by the creator, you know, yours goddamn truly. You'll probably make a killing on Ebay in a few years if you auction it off to my ravenous fanbase. The bids’ll come in fucking droves bro, you gotta be prepared," Dave says, voice fading out beneath Jade's before popping back like someone jacked the volume knob the moment she finished talking.

"Ebay? Ah, so you give full permission to send it back from whence it came?" Rose says, leaning back against Dave and looking over her shoulder at him. "Clearly that hoop is just the reskinned version of some bulk-bought dollar store stock. Those jpeg vinyl decals are fooling no one, wonderfully shitty though they may be."

"That ain't the point, Rose. Of course my legit merch would have to piggyback off the dry bones of some shitty corporate mass-produced kid toys. My fans think I'm some sincere humble bumpkin operating out of my garage in the big city—d'ya really think they'd stand for actual, professional-grade fandom swag? I'd be laughed out of the country. I'd be disowned by the online community. I'd lose my own respect, Rose, wouldn't be able to face my reflection if I actually put time and money into making shit that my readers would otherwise wanna hang above their fireplaces like some big game trash trophy. Also," he says, leaning further back into the corner to avoid her encroaching personal bubble, "Ebay? You kidding? Got that shit off AliExpress."

"Oh my god!" exclaims Jade before she leaps up onto the bed and nearly sends the cake flying from its precarious position on Rose's knees. "Stop listening in on their nonsensical bullshit and just open the present already!"

"All right, all right," says John, running his hand over the book-sized cardboard box in his lap before pulling open the top. "Haha, holy shit! Is that really—"

"A magic-hat modus!!! Do you like it? I knew you didn't have one, and I figured it'd be cooler than your boring queuestack array setup," she says, as he lifts the modus card out of its box and inspects it.

"Hey! It's a perfectly functional setup thing, even if it is really boring."

"Can't believe you've had that same modus for four whole years, dude," says Dave. "I can't even remember what I had when I was a shitty thirteen year old scamp."

"If I remember correctly, yours was a hash map," supplies Rose.

"Oh yeah."

"Rather dangerous modi, those. They have a notable penchant for ejecting items according to their users' immediate whims, sensible or otherwise. I believe you narrowly missed impaling me with one of your swords when I helped you clean out your apartment—simply because you wanted me to stop touching your photographs."

A grin tugs at his mouth. "Think you're losing your touch, Rose, leaving yourself open to a joke about being impaled on my sword is just some weaksauce shit."

"And if you'd found yourself inclined to make one, I might retort with what I remember was impaled in my stead," she replies, smile all too smug and dripping with equivocation as she watches Dave's face fall in her peripheral.

"Yeah ok, no. That's some verboten territory you're waltzing into. We had an agreement, Rose. A fucking blood pact to never mention that accident again. You can't renege on me like this. Especially," he says, waggling his eyebrows meaningfully at Jade and John, "in polite goddamn company."

"It wasn't that serious an exchange."

"You made me sign a legally binding contract saying you owned my soul! It had watermarks, Rose. Fucking official watermarks."

"And later, I filed the correct paperwork required to return it to you."

"Yeah, so I wouldn't tell Mom you'd caught that octo-princess doll on fire because your stupid ouija modus fucked up and ejected it onto some candles," he shot back, spitfire voice sharp in Rose's ear as he digs his chin into her shoulder, leaning on her while he reaches around her other side and sneaks more icing. Rose grimaces. That particular accident had occurred following her ill-advised idea to switch from tree—how was she to have known ghosts had such a proclivity for pyromania? "Not that souls are actually real or anything so who really gives a shit about that."

"Don't you guys still find it weird?" asks John, disregarding the… whatever Rose and Dave are jabbering about.

"Find what weird?" asks Jade, who shifts to lean against the wall next to Rose, snuggling up to her shoulder.

"I mean Dave and Rose." He turns to look at them. "Isn't it still kinda weird that you two, like, met on the internet..."

"And then, years later, discovered we were long-lost siblings through sheer chance?" Rose finishes, seeming to read his mind. Not for the first time, either.

"Yeah! Isn't that sort of reeaaallly REALLY weird??" John says, scrunching up his face and staring at them, incredulity evident. Rose and Dave exchange a glance, Rose tilting her head to avoid knocking Dave's shades off his face.

"Not really any more than you finding out Jade's your estranged cousin," Dave says, looking back at John.

"See!! That's weird too! It's weird that in our friend group we're all secretly related," John exclaims. "I mean, you and Rose, and me and Jade. Jade and me aren't related to you two, that would just be crossing a line!" He smiles, but his brow furrows. "We all just met on pesterchum one day and then bam! years later suddenly Jade is my cousin and you two are brother and sister. Stuff like that never happens. Well, except for in movies. But this isn't a movie! It's real life and it's weird as fuck."

"Coincidences happen, John. It's a strange universe," says Rose.

"Thought you didn't believe in coincidences?" Dave says into her ear around a mouthful of icing.

Rose smiles. "I don't."

"Umm well okay," says Jade. "Putting Rose being all dark and mysterious aside, you still haven't opened her present either."

"What's with you and presents today?" asks Dave. "You're like hyperfixated on them. Think you're more excited to know what they are than John is."

"I just want to know if all my guesses were correct again!" she says. "My precognition isn't what it used to be, but I can still get stuff right sometimes." Her front teeth embed themselves in her lower lip, and she looks momentarily crestfallen. Then she brightens. "But I was right about your gift Dave, and obviously mine." She laughs, and her goofy, cheery grin is back again. "And now it's Rose's turn!!"

"And have you any intention of sharing your fortuitous guess regarding my present?" asks Rose.

"Nope, because if I'm right it'll spoil it for John," says Jade, rolling her eyes with such bodily emphasis that she almost falls sideways off the bed. "Obviously, Rose!"

"Ah, of course. I almost forgot your considerate reticence when it comes to spoilers. My bad."

"Well, it isn't like it really matters," says John. "Since you only ever give me knitted stuff anyway it's not much of a surprise."

Rose almost looks offended. "I was under the impression that you liked my knitted stuff, John. Or are you finally admitting your long-standing insincerity with regards to—"

"Ok, nope, I'm hitting the brakes on the psychmobile again," interrupts Dave. "No accusing the birthday boy of playing Lalider-tier mind games. We've been over this, Rose. Just accept that the knitting needles were as sincere a gift as they come and let the poor guy open his shit in peace."

"Hadn't we agreed that the combination of our surnames was Strilonde?" she asks, distracting him over one shoulder while she discreetly smears blue cake icing on his jean-clad leg, stretched out against the wall behind her and Jade. She draws a dick and Jade hides a snort.

"Nah because that sounds dumb as hell. Lalider's where it's at."

"Of course," she says, and draws another, smaller dick beside the first in white.

"And anyway John, I wouldn't bet on that this year!!" Jade says excitedly, before she backtracks and covers her mouth with both hands. "Whoops, sorry! Spoilers."

"You're certainly confident in your abilities," says Rose, her smirk teasing at the edges as she regards Jade.

"Well I sure have a vague yet prominent feeling that whatever is in that box isn't a scarf!" Jade grins at her and nudges up under Rose's arm so that it's slung across her shoulders, steadily wriggling her way into snuggle territory. She wraps both arms around Rose's chest and hunkers down, bent nearly double to fit her admirable height under her friend's arm. Rose smiles down at her when she turns her attention back to John, and it's a warm, affectionate thing; much like Jade herself. Rose supposes that being raised almost solely by a dog has its perks, though certainly not without its caveats. She can remember when they first met in person; she can remember in perfect, harrowing detail Jade's complete lack of understanding when it came to social norms and personal boundaries. This was before Dave had overcome his aversion to touch—late night slumber piles, careful wrestling over console controllers, and Rose’s bootleg therapy had helped in that respect—and Jade's sudden greeting-bearhug had nearly sent him into a panic attack.

Fortunately, both issues have been mostly resolved by now, which is why Dave didn't flinch away or tense under Rose's fingers when she decided to do some culinary finger-painting—because yes, of course he knows she's doing it, give the dude some fucking credit here holy shit he knows exactly what a dick feels like when it's being drawn on him. Listen, ok? If someone manages to draw a dick on Dave’s face while he's sleeping, it's because he wants them to. A combination of being perhaps the lightest sleeper in the world and a hypersensitivity to dicks in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word makes that fucking certain.

"So my present's in a box??" says John, interrupting what would have been at least thirty additional sentences to a scintillating paragraph about Dave and genitalia in their various forms, and grinning even as he pretends to glare at Jade. "Well now my birthday is ruined because I know that Rose's present is in a box!!! Thanks for not tagging your spoilers properly, Jade!"

"Oohhhh nooooo!!!" Jade smooshes her very smooshable cheeks together and hangs her mouth open in an almost certainly accidental impression of _The Scream_ (Edvard Munch, 1893), before the charade crumbles completely and she laughs, tugging John's crossed arms from his chest and taking hold of his wrists to waggle them like an overly-involved puppeteer. "Ok but seriously!!" She turns to Rose and, if she were to stick out her tongue right now, would probably be licking her nose with how close their faces are—actually, uh, oh god. Did she really-? Yes. She did. Gross. She pulls back almost immediately, making a face at the taste of foundation, powder, and some extra-disgusting setting spray. Rose huffs a triumphant laugh at the sight of the makeup smear on her tongue before Jade scrapes it off with her teeth. Creamy in shade, but certainly not in taste.

"Well great, Harley. Now Rose is gonna have to spend another fifty minutes hogging the mirror just to touch-up her nose," says Dave.

Rose turns to him, and he jerks back to avoid having his shades jettisoned off his face by her sudden involvement in his immediate vicinity. "You spend far longer than me in the bathroom on just your hair, Dave, let alone your makeup. With the time you devote to following every 'no-makeup makeup look' Youtube tutorial to the letter I would expect you to walk out in the morning resplendent in godlike beauty." She purses her lips in mock scrutiny as she studies him. "As it is, you fall remarkably short of that particular achievement."

"No need to pile on the compliments, sis. You're being borderline fucking unctuous and it's making me uncomfortable," he replies, voice so deadpan it's like he's being beaten to death with kitchenware. Then, of course, he too licks her face when she turns back to Jade. John and Jade laugh, high-pitched and breathy, scrunching up their faces and shaking their shoulders with their Egbarley-trademarked laugh at Rose's disgusted expression. Behind the disgust is a look of careful calculation, and both John and Jade settle down as they begin to pity Dave for whatever Rose is planning for him.

"If we're quite done with the picayune chatter," Rose says, voice dry as she slowly wipes Dave's spit from her face, "I believe you have a present to open." She hides both hands behind her back and uncaptchalogues something, keeping it concealed from both Jade and John. Dave looks down and rolls his eyes. "Just to clarify, Jade, you mean to maintain your point that nothing about this gift is related to knitting?"

"Hmm," hums Jade, peering at Rose through her glasses, eyes almost glowing as she considers. "I think, just to clarify, that what is _in_ that box is not something you knitted."

Rose purses her lips. "Interesting use of emphasis," she says, before letting out a resigned sigh. "I suppose I shall have to bow to your superior ruling and accept that your wholly irritating, though entirely endearing foreknowledge is as meddlesome as ever." Finally, she takes the gift from behind her back and reveals it to her captivated audience. Well—two-thirds captivated. Dave is more focused on quietly tying Jade's green ribbon to one of Rose's belt buckles behind her. He had briefly considered keeping it until Rose's own birthday and reusing it on one of her gifts, but that's sort of a long-con deal and really more her style than his. He doesn't quite have the patience or interest for a move like that—even if it would be totally sweet to see her reaction.

Jade's sudden peal of laughter takes his attention by force, and he pauses in his movements to watch her and John stare down at Rose's gift; a large parcel, colour and contents entirely concealed by several thick layers of knitted wool. A pattern is assiduously knitted into the gift-cozy; reds, blues, greens, and purples melding together in the most appealing ways that such clashing colours can meld.

"Oh, haha," says John, looking vaguely bemused. "So I guess Jade was right then! What's IN there isn't knitting. Cool!"

"Yes, John," Rose says, smile twisting as she rolls her eyes. "Thank you for explaining that especially Machiavellian interaction for those in the audience who didn't quite understand. I'm sure they appreciated your considerable acumen and sweet catch of the abstruse, low-flying joke before it soared over their respective heads." Then her expression takes on a certain sharp, quietly smug quality. "However, I think you'll find that Jade's assumption was not entirely correct. The pressing vagary in question is—"

"Oh my god," interrupts Dave, rubbing at his eyes beneath the shades. "It isn't in a box. That's it. That's the whole thing. The gift ain't in a box. You fucked up, Jade. Must be the metric fuckload of fourth-dimensional cuboids we normally lavish on John that messed with your psychic fortune-telling bullshit."

Rose, expression unchanging save for a slight tightening around her lips, takes a deep, quiet breath. "I'll thank you to untie that bow from my skirt," is the only thing she says. For now. Dave grimaces and begins the epic process of detangling the mess of half-formed knots that he'd employed to ensure the bow didn't come off her ass too soon, while John and Jade look momentarily confused.

"So what is it then?" asks John, finally taking the soft bundle from Rose.

"Isn't the point of gift wrapping to conceal its precious ward until such time as its removal?" Rose asks.

John looks concerned. "But how do I..." He turns the present over and examines its seemingly seamless exterior. "How do I open it?"

Rose smiles, and Jade recognises it as a distinctly underhanded one she usually reserves for her opponent during the second-to-last move in a game of chess. "That's up to you, John. The responsibility of postage is out of my hands now."

"Uh... huh. But it seems like you've spent a long time on this, Rose! I can't just cut it open or unravel it or something." He peers at it closely. "There isn't even like a, a seam or anything? What?" he mutters. "That's really weird."

"What is?" asks Jade.

"It's just... look at it. It's just one big thing of knitting," he says, showing her. "There's normally like an edge or something? Then I could find the tail and undo it so I can open it, but there's—just nothing."

"The tail?" Jade asks, trying to rein in her smile.

"That's what it's called!" says John, trying to remain serious but ultimately folding under the contagious grinning machine that is Jade Harley. "See? It's just weird. There should be some sort of beginning and end but there doesn't seem to be."

"There doesn't... SEAM to be???" Jade grins openly, teeth white and glowing against her dark skin like stars against a night sky, and John laughs.

"Yes, exactly!"

"Dude, just cut it open," says Dave, looking up from behind Rose. "Give it here, I'll do it."

"You will not," interjects Rose, barely turning her head to look at him.

"I damn well will too," he says. "So you can stop messing with him over this. Pass, John?" He reaches around Rose to John, but before he can be passed anything, Rose grabs his wrist. He makes a face at her and reaches around her other side with his free hand, but she grabs that too. He lets out a long, defeated sigh, and his forehead thonks into the back of her neck as he flops against her like a puppet experiencing a sudden and notable lack of strings—or perhaps, in Dave’s case, a hand up its ass.

Rose turns triumphantly back to Jade and John, and pulls her arms—and Dave's, by extension—across herself in an attempt to keep his hands out of trouble. Of course, because they find themselves within tickling proximity of her sides, Rose fails this attempt and yelps, trying to jerk Dave's hands away from her only moments later. Despite Rose's considerable strength, Dave's arms remain a steel cage around her, and she finds her King officially and very resolutely checked. She writhes and shrieks, but he only grins against her neck as she attempts to kick him in the face. The cake, of course, goes flying from her lap, and John and Jade barely spare a moment before they scramble to execute a sweet catch of the airborne pastry.

It is, in a word, a mess. In their haste to interrupt the awkward and undoubtedly unpleasant meeting between cake and floor, they collide, and within the next few seconds John's glasses are knocked from his face, Jade trips over her own hair, and Dave and Rose end up tumbling off the bed. Dave twists as they fall, so they both land on their sides rather than leaving Rose to take the brunt of the impact, but with all eight limbs tangled together they wind up momentarily winded and motionless on the floor. Jade and John end up in a remarkably similar situation several feet further from the bed, with Jade on her back and John's knees planted either side of her thighs as he tries to avoid crushing her beneath him—though, admittedly, she's got nearly half a foot and twenty pounds on him, so he should probably be more thankful he landed on top. They exchange a confused look, wondering where the cake went, before Jade's eyes widen and she goes to shove him off.

"Look out, John!" she yelps, but the cake lands on the back of his head, icing-side down and plate flinging away, before she even gets the first word out.

It's awful. Cake goes everywhere. Icing sprays around his head like a halo. John fancies that his life flashes before his eyes as the accursed slab of confectionery embeds itself fully in his hair and makes acquaintances with the back of his ears. He never expected to have cake on the back of his ears, but here he is, enjoying the title of John 'Cake-Ears' Egbert. In the seconds after impact he remains frozen over Jade, feeling icing trickle down his neck and watching crumbs scatter and disappear into her curly hair as they fall from his thoroughly assaulted skull. Jade has, amazingly, managed to completely avoid getting any cake on her face; John makes for an excellent human shield. Though she will need to have a shower because that shit landed exactly everywhere other than her face, making a John-head-shaped imprint on the floor—and her hair—around them.

There are a few seconds thereafter, where silence reigns completely in the sunny room. The warm, perfectly pleasant setting is sharply juxtaposed with the shocked look on John's face, and Dave and Rose remain tangled together as they watch what is almost certainly a shitstorm brewing. Jade's lips twitch.

Then the silence breaks.

Howling with laughter, Jade buckles under John, curling up and trying to rein in her chest-wracking fit. Dave and Rose are slowly losing their shit just as hard by the bed, Rose sitting up and leaving Dave to laugh himself to tears on the floor as she tries, and fails, to remain composed. She ends up nearly cackling behind a hand as she braces the other against Dave's hip to stay upright, and Dave slaps the floor and cries at the sight of cake sliding in chunks off John's motionless back.

The three of them are still awaiting John's reaction; will it be a freak-out of epic proportions or a calm acceptance of his cake-filled existence? They're all surprised, and sort of relieved, when he joins in with their laughter, his shaking shoulders sending more cake _shlop_ _ping_ wetly to the floor as he sits back and tries not to splatter any more on Jade. She wheezes, almost in tears, at the sight of him sitting up, glasses-less and squinting and dripping, and her face actually hurts from laughing so hard.

"Oh?" John says, grinning down at her, and Jade suddenly freezes at the dangerous look in his eyes. "Is this _funny_ to you?" Jade shrieks and tries to scramble away as John latches on to her and pulls a handful of cake from his hair. "Are you amused by my _suffering_??"

"John noooo!!!" she cries, giggling hysterically as he pins her to the floor and thwarts her every attempt at escape, all while his cake-filled hand hovers dangerously close to her face. She tries to shove him off, but he clamps an arm around her shoulders and wraps his legs about her waist, so she flips them both over like John's a toddler clinging to her front. They both collapse into giggles at the wet, squishing sound of the remaining cake in his hair smooshing into the carpet, before John slaps his handful against the back of her head. It makes the most ridiculous _SCHLOP_ sound, like the sound fx from one of Dave's comics come to life, and he and Rose choke around their laughter from beside the bed.

Jade makes a horrified expression—and, once he realises the situation he's in, so does John.

Being trapped under an angry, six-foot-tall goddess with a lifetime of wrestling hellbeasts and probably climbing mountains or some shit tends to age a joke real quick, and John desperately whispers, "I am so fucking sorry."

"John..." she mutters, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, "do you KNOW how long that's going to take to wash out?"

"Uh," says John. "No?" He grins nervously, and the bet pays off when her warm smile peeks around the storm manifesting behind her glasses. Still, he remains motionless beneath her, and lets his legs fall from around her hips, preparing to make a daring escape if he needs to. He awaits her judgement like a man awaiting the fall of the gavel.

Her ruling takes him by surprise. "I'm showering first!" she exclaims, and by the time John's processed the words she's already out the bedroom door and sprinting for the bathroom.

"Hey, wait!" he yelps, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to follow. He takes a moment to scoop up his glasses from the carpet before scrambling for the door, leaping over Dave and narrowly avoiding kicking Rose in the face. With a hasty, single-syllable apology of "Whoops!" he scampers out of the room and slams the door behind him. Rose and Dave listen to two sets of thundering footsteps make their way up the hall and exchange expressions of fond exasperation.

"Do you think those two know how to be quiet?" Rose asks as she extricates herself neatly from Dave, slightly delayed by his insistence upon ragdolling around her like his limbs are weak, arms spaghetti. She manages anyway, and moves to perch on the edge of John's bed, one foot nudging Dave's ankle.

She seems to like doing that. Just sort of... keeping in constant, casual contact, like a quiet reminder of their propinquity. He doesn't mind; far from it. He was probably the instigator of the whole gently reassuring touchy-feely thing, really, if he cared to remember back to when they were both thirteen and feeling like the whole world was against them. Back four years exactly to when he lived with his brother in an apartment in Texas and then, quite suddenly, lived _alone_ in an apartment in Texas. If he cared to, he could remember the almost too-eager way he had been welcomed into the Lalonde household thereafter, moving away from the empty rooms and the strifeless rooftop and the fucking _puppets,_ still _everywhere_ —except for the one puppet that really seemed to matter.

He can only assume that wherever his bro fucked off to, he took Cal with him. Good fucking riddance, he says, sometimes, quietly, when no one can hear or he pretends Rose can't even if she's right there next to him, listening. He's got no one better to vent to in this universe and they both know it—even if they can't quite remember who would replace her in another one. _Replace_ is a shitty word, even in context; there's no replacement for Rose in his life, not really, but even as he winces at it she keeps this cool, rough expression on her face like she knows better than he does, which is probably true.

Whatever, though. He leaves his leg where it is and feels her trace a knot of scar tissue with her toes.

"They're Harleyberts, dunno what you expect," he says, looking up at her from the floor, all limp and curled up like a cat, still wrapped around the ghost imprint of where she lay minutes before.

"Egbarleys," she corrects.

He snorts. "C'mon, we both know Harleybert is the better portmanteau. You're just pulling this truculent bullshit with me for the sake of sibling discourse."

"Oh, only because you're such a good debate partner," she says, smile so sly he knows exactly what she's thinking and groans.

"Oh no, you're not gonna goad me into making a master debater joke, I'm not bowing to your level Rose. We've been over this. No use beating a gift horse in the mouth or whatever the fuck," he says.

"A malaphor?" Her smile widens. "So you're not going to burn that bridge when you get to it?"

"You're barking up the wrong alley here," he says, lips twitching upwards.

"I'll let the cards fall where they lay, then."

"Well it takes two to skin a cat with one stone."

"You can't add to a book's injury by insulting its spilt milk."

"Think you're biting off more rocks than a silver-lined hard place in your ballcourt," he counters. By now, they're both grinning like idiots, all wrapped up in bogus self-satisfaction—bogus in Dave's case, at least—and the warm, almost stifling atmosphere of John's room. At the sound of footsteps in the hallway outside, they fall silent, and Dave sits up to avoid being hit by the door that flies open a few seconds later.

"I assume that in the cake-infused struggle for the shower, you were not the crowned victor?" says Rose, pulling up her feet and tucking them under her legs. Dave joins her on the bed, settling back on his hands and sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce so his knee bumps her thigh.

"Jade picked me up and threatened to dunk me in the toilet," John admits, cake-encrusted head hanging low like an admonished dog. Rose can almost see a tail tucked between his legs as he heads to his wardrobe across the room and sifts through the hangers to find a clean shirt.

"I'm surprised she didn't just start stripping in front of you to send your chivalrous ass packing," Dave says. "She's done that to me before."

"Because you refused to vacate the bathroom mirror when she wanted a shower," interjects Rose.

"Oh come on," he says, adamant. "There was another bathroom down the hall!"

"She didn’t _want_ that bathroom."

"Ok well, yeah," he acquiesces with a shrug, "I guess it is sorta just easier to give Jade whatever she wants."

"And that's got nothing to do with you being a massive pushover when it comes to girls!" says John, laughing. Rose smiles.

"Hey now," says Dave, raising both hands in mock self-defense. "Don't undercut me. I'm a massive pushover when it comes to all genders. Girls, guys, nonbinary folk, I don't discriminate." John snickers. He pulls a shirt off its hanger before turning back to them.

"Hey, do you guys mind just..." He makes a face like a punctual colon and a forward slash at the sight of Rose and Dave posing like two _extremely_ attentive audience members. Dave's now sprawled across the bed, one leg propped up behind the other and his upper body in Rose's lap, elbow resting on her thigh. Both his hands are curled into ersatz binoculars over top of his shades. Rose is leaning over Dave, elbow on his ribcage and fist tucked up under her chin. Both twins are staring intently at John, the focus in their serious expressions rivalled only by like, the focus of really engrossed old people putting puzzles together at public libraries, or those crystals in high-powered lasers or something. Is that how lasers work? John's punctuation-defined expression scrunches up until some form of eyebrow emote is forcibly involved. Probably something like  >:[ .

"Do we mind what?" Dave asks, face as blank as a really punchable brick wall.

"I think he means to ask if we mind sitting here, watching him get dressed with all the absorption of the elderly in their public library puzzle-solving," says Rose, playing along, insincerity dripping from her dulcet tones.

"Or focused on that naked boyflesh like the collimated beam of a laser being sent through the front lense, getting all up in that ripe focal point's shit like we're gettin' paid for it," continues Dave, finally blurting out something so non sequitur even Rose blinks and looks down at him with confusion. She recovers quickly, picking up the pieces of her broken character and sliding back into them as she returns her burning gaze to John.

"Is that what you mean, John?" she asks, voice so sweet it could bring bees back from the brink of extinction.

"No, it isn't!" he says, groaning and resting his forehead against the cold wood of the wardrobe door. "And you know it." He groans again, face now firmly planted in the door and glasses digging into his nose. "Do I really have to say please?"

"Yes," come the entwined voices behind him.

"That _is_ the magic word," says Rose, and he can just _hear_ her smirking.

"Ugh." He straightens and parts ways with the wardrobe, making a face at the now slightly cake-smeared wood. "Fine!! Rose and Dave could you PLEASE not be creepy pervs and watch me take my shirt off! Even though I know you totally want to, Dave," he adds with a laugh.

"No argument from me dude," replies Dave. "I'm madly in love with you. This is an established fact and no one can question it under fear of state-mandated execution."

John hears a surprised yelp from behind him, and risks turning around to see Dave and Rose in similar positions to before, except now Dave is splayed across Rose's lap, her hands over his eyes in lieu of the sunglasses now perched on her nose. His hands, too, are covering her eyes, palms jammed quite snugly between shades and face, fingers hidden in her bangs. John takes the opportunity to scan Dave’s face, now naked as it is. He can’t see his eyes, hidden as they are behind Rose’s small, delicate hands, but it’s still strange to see him without shades. The broken bridge of his beaky nose is even more prominent now.

"Dave and I are now thoroughly blind to whatever state of nakedness you may be in," Rose says. "For the sake of your modesty."

"Thanks," says John, making another face which is as lost on these two as it was on the wardrobe door. "No peeking though!"

"Wouldn't dream of it man. Peeking is for soap opera tropes and fucking with a baby's lack of object permanence, not for creepin' out my best bro when he's getting his naked on."

John snorts, and tugs his shirt over his head.

 

Jade takes forty minutes and half the bottle of John's shampoo before she finally emerges. Steam wraps around her ankles and follows her down the hall as she heads for the bedroom, scrubbing at her now nearly knee-length hair and good-naturedly cursing John's name for how long this shit is gonna take to dry. Egbert is dead, you hear her? Dead!!! In a good way, she means, of course. But still totally dead!!! She passes John's dad on the way, and beams at him.

"Hello, Mr. Egbert!" He looks her up and down, taking in her bare feet and damp clothes, well steamed and pressed from their earlier proximity to the shower, and nods, as sage as one of Rose's wizards. She can nearly feel the fond fatherly pride radiating from him. He may be her uncle, but the man's so fatherly he nearly transcends genetic disposition! Jade's smile widens and she skips the rest of the way to John's room, heavy skirt bouncing around her legs. When she reaches the door she finds it closed, so she barges it open and flings her wet towel over John's head where he's sitting on the bed. Dave and Rose are nowhere to be seen, but she's sure they'll show up.

"Your turn!"

"Jade, finally!" He doesn't even bother to shove the towel from his head, leaving it on as he leaps up and grabs her by the shoulders. "Look at what Rose got us!!!"

"What?" she asks. "You mean you didn't wait for me before you opened it???"

"Aw, yeah, I'm sorry Jade. I just had to know! But come on, it's so great you'll HAVE to forgive me for getting cake in your hair and opening the present when you were in the shower." His tone is anything but apologetic as he grins at her, but she can't stay mad with the way his eyes are lit up and his dimples are making a guest appearance.

"Wait," she says, suddenly confused. "Us?"

"Yeah!" He swings back to the bed and grabs something from the covers. He turns back and, grin taking on a mischievous glint, hides both hands behind his back. "But first you need to guess which hand it's in."

"John..." she says, but her laughter is evident in the way the corners of her eyes scrunch up behind her glasses, and in the glint of teeth behind her lips. "I guess... both!!!" She lunges forward and wraps her arms around John, reaching back and grabbing his hands in hers. He laughs, and tries to twist away, but she's already taken hold of him and is leaning over his shoulder to peek into his immobilised hands. He goes still and she can feel his heart pounding against her chest, but she figures it to be prankster nerves when she realises that both hands are empty.

"Nope!" he says, and she groans and tries to pull away—but not before John flicks the towel off his head and onto hers. It flops over one of her eyes and he snorts, stepping back and smiling at the sight of her standing there, in her loose singlet and long skirt, hair dripping wet and now embellished with a cake-stained towel; the cake in John's hair still being a total thing that is happening. "Hey, actually, I should probably go deal with this before I get cake on anything else."

"Now just wait a hot freaking minute, aren't you going to show me the present first?" She slides the towel from her head and makes a face at him.

"Well I would, but this whole cake-hair-thing is a pretty pressing issue!" He winks, which is a generous way of describing the emphatic scrunching blink thing that always happens to his face when he tries to wink. "I guess you'll just have to wait and find out later!" The bedroom door slams and he's suddenly gone, and Jade's left holding a damp, vaguely birthday-themed towel alone in John's room. She snorts, and lets him get away with it this time. But only this time! Next time she'll show no mercy. Her completely disingenuous thoughts are interrupted by a sudden yell from outside John's window, and she investigates, pressing her face up against the glass and staring down into the yard. It's Dave and Rose! Dave's lying face-down in the grass, several feet from where John's weird slimer pogo ride is rocking madly back and forth. Rose watches on, completely unruffled, from her seat on the swings. Jade's not really all too surprised that Rose isn't actually swinging, just sitting there, hands in her lap, feet trailing on the ground as she watches her brother mumble into the grass; Rose isn't really the swinging type! Still, it's almost a waste of a good swingset, and Jade decides to make up for Rose's aversion to all things conventionally fun.

She opens the window and leans out to yell a greeting. "Hey guys!" She smiles down at them, and Rose raises a hand to wave. Dave sits up and sends her a mock salute. Neither are really the sort to yell, even in the privacy of their friend's backyard, but Jade is loud enough for the both of them. "John is having a shower! The pisslord wouldn't tell me what you got him!!"

Rose shields her eyes from the sun as she peers up into the window. "What was your guess?" she calls, and Dave looks at her and says something Jade doesn't quite catch.

Her grin grows wider, which any unfamiliar onlooker would have deemed impossible only moments ago, and she shouts, "Plane tickets!!!" Rose and Dave both flash smiles at her, and she pumps two fists in the air. "Called it!" then, "Also, yay!!!"

Rose stands, leaving her swing with such grace that it scarcely dares to sway in her absence, and tucks a hand behind her back. "My fair lady is too bold," she calls, and Jade snickers at her.

"But soft," says Dave, and Jade's almost surprised to hear him speak louder than his usual indoor-mumbling voice, "What light through that fuckin' window breaks?"

"Not quite iambic pentameter. Is that the abridged edition?" Rose asks, loud enough for Jade to hear.

"Yeah." He stands, and positions himself beside Rose to stare up at Jade. "Goes like this. What light through that fuckin' window breaks? Shit's the east, our Jade is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and fuck up the jealous moon, who's already right under the weather with a mad attack of the sads 'cause you're a ten and the moon's a four point five in the right light—" Jade's laughter tolls like a bell in the spring air, and Dave's monologue cuts off as he falls into a grin at the sound.

Rose, too, is barely containing her amusement, and picks right back up where he leaves off. "Avert your path from Jade's, for the moon is pent with a jealous wrath. Garb yourself not in its virginial temperament, for upon us it casts a sickly hue. Discard it! Jade, my lady, oh my love, oh that you knew you were! My gaze upon you casts a hue of bewonderment—"

"Bewonderment??" interjects Dave, and Rose sends him a glare that rolls off him where it would burn any other.

"Dearest old William made up several thousand words over the run of his plays," she says, eyes flashing sharp purple in the sun.

"You're no Willy S.," he replies, "and 'bewonderment' sounds like the name of a shitty mayo brand. Or like that spray-on cheese in a can stuff."

"Then I suppose I should be flattered that you're likening my linguistic venture to a product you used to buy by the dozen and shoot directly down your throat," she says, and his head lolls on his shoulders like a simple eye-roll wouldn't suffice in response. "I still can't shop in the dairy section without fondly revisiting the disgusting memory of you coughing orange cheese slop all over the couch because you were so amused by your own joke that you choked on it."

Dave groans. "That was ONE TIME! You can't go a single goddamn week without bringing that back up, can you."

"Absolutely not."

Jade's laughter continues its long-running theme of interrupting disputes, and the two arguing on the lawn look up at her again. "I think you told me about that! You couldn't eat it anymore after that, could you?" Dave rubs the back of his neck with a sheepish hand, but stops when Rose raises a brow at him.

"So what? People get over weird food obsessions all the time. Just 'cause it correlates with... you know what, this is one asinine fucking conversation we're holding and you're still in John's room. Gonna come down any time, Jade Montague? Or are we gonna have to spin another impromptu sonnet for ya?"

Jade smiles. She doesn't even bother answering before she starts clambering out the window, because that is just such a normal fucking thing for someone to do when they're on the second floor of someone's house. Somehow, amidst the flimsy piping on John's house and the concerned cries of "Just use the fucking door, Harley," she manages to plant both feet firmly on the ground. She pulls her skirt down from where she'd hiked it around her thighs, and turns back to Dave and Rose.

"I wouldn't mind another of your sonnets, to be honest," she says, before heading straight for the swings. "I don't know much about Shakespeare, but I get the feeling you're doing him exactly the justice he deserves!"

"Pretty much," says Dave.

"I'll note down your lack of aversion to cliched poetry for future reference," Rose says, and goes to sit side-saddle on the pogo slime. Dave takes the remaining swing on Jade's other side, and kicks himself off the ground slowly, scuffing his shoes on the dirt.

Jade's already swinging with the energy of an excited child at the park, and she replies on the apex of the next swing. "Sure thing! But I'm warning you now, if you're going to use it to woo me, you'll have to try harder!"

"Oh?" Rose asks, and Dave hates that he knows the interest in her voice isn't as insincere as she makes it sound.

"Yeah," Jade says, laughing. "You already have Dave's raps to contend with!" He doesn't even have to look at Rose to know how she's looking at him, all sharp-eyed and needle-toothed. He knows exactly what she's going to say next, and grimaces in advance.

"That would certainly be an issue," Rose says, sharp and melodic like the blade of a guillotine, "if it were simply _your_ heart he was set upon." As it turns out, that was worse than he'd expected. He grimaces harder to make up for his lapse in judgement, even gets some eyebrow action in there to really seal the fucking deal.

"Huh?" Jade asks, but decides to abandon the query for now in favour for swinging higher. She'll approach Dave about it later, and crack him open like a particularly awkward and easily flustered nut. It'll certainly be easier than trying to parse Rose's allusions when they're all wrapped up in sibling rivalry like this.

 

John steps out of the shower, as cakeless and clean as the day he was born. Which he can only hope is the way he was born—for whatever reason, his dad's never really talked about it. He gets dressed, and is startled by a message written on the steam in the mirror. 'smile! :)' is scribed in Jade's unmistakably curly hand across it; she must have written it when she got out of the shower earlier. He does as it says without even realising, and doesn't entertain the notion of wiping it off so he can see actually himself for very long. His glasses are fogged to fuck and back anyway, so it'd be a useless attempt—as well as the pointless destruction of something about as cute and innocent as a thing can get.

After getting dressed, John makes his way to his bedroom. Upon looking inside and finding all of his friends absent, and looking through the window to find empty swings and an empty yard, he heads downstairs to find them.

"I am not playing poker with you," comes Dave's voice from the living room. "I'm just not fucking doing it. Not again." John stops and listens.

"Then perhaps you would be kind enough to indulge me?" Rose asks someone else, her voice slinking and velvet, like a cat sneaking around a dark corner.

"Don't drag Jade into this! Jade, don't listen to her, she'll pull some underhanded Machiavellian bullfuckery and you'll end up betting your bra with a royal flush in-hand and she'll still win."

Jade hums, loud enough to carry up the stairs. "Then it's a good thing I'm not wearing a bra!"

John muffles a snort with one hand while Dave desperately groans, and John can just see his head in his hands.

"Putting aside that delightful revelation," Rose says, sounding rather intrigued, "Dave, that example sounded oddly specific. You phrased it as though you were betting your _own_ lingerie last time we played."

"Holy shit, can we maybe not talk about this right now?" he replies, voice ticking up a few octaves, as it usually does when he lets Rose wind him up. John's shoulders shake with hidden laughter as he finally sits on the stairs, amused.

"Oh? Do you have a preferred time in mind to discuss our predominant overlap in fashion taste?"

"Yeah the time is never and the venue is the cold flames of hell. I'll meet you there after I walk into Egbert's study and brain myself with the safe."

"You wore Rose's bra?" Jade asks, and her sudden, cheery involvement in the conversation is like someone injecting lime jelly into the heart of a mind-numbingly embarrassing doughnut.

"It was a funny and understandable joke in context," Dave tries to justify.

"I just didn't think you were comfortable doing that kind of thing?"

"He wore it over his shirt," says Rose, and the underlying fondness in her voice belies the clinical way the sentence is delivered.

"Ohhh."

"We were playing strip poker."

"Oh fuck, don't keep going!" Dave yelps, and John chuckles quietly.

"I'm simply giving context in the hopes that Jade finds it both funny and understandable," and John can hear by the way her voice curls around the words that Rose is trying to restrain a smile.

"Anyway—"

"Rose!"

"—we deigned to make it fair by beginning with—"

"Oh my god."

"—an equal amount of clothing. Naturally, his—"

"How heavy do you think that safe actually is?"

"—binder didn't count as a valid bet, so—"

"As in..."

"—he was at a tactical disadvantage, given that I had one more—"

"... do you think I could just pick it up..."

"—article than he. Being the kind and generous sister that I am—"

"...and use it as a makeshift club to beat myself to death?"

"—I graciously allowed him to borrow something of mine. As it happened, neither of us were invested enough to move much further than a few feet to acquire a garment, and the nearest was a discarded bra."

"I could probably lift it," Dave continues to mumble to himself. "Maybe Dadbert would help."

"I don't think physician-assisted suicide counts if the assistor in question is not an actual doctor," says Rose. "If anything, you would be involving John's father in your manslaughter."

"Don't involve my dad in your shady dealings!" John finally pipes up, standing and heading the rest of the way down the stairs. "Especially if your shady dealings involve your death," he adds, grimacing at Dave. "I don't want you to die."

"I'm so touched, dude," says Dave. "That's such a completely especial baseline for a healthy relationship. They'll be writing books waxing laudatory about our coupling for years to fucking come."

"Relationship?" Rose asks. " _Coupling_??"

Dave sends her a dirty look. "A healthy fucking _friendship_ , Lalonde, and a _platonic_ coupling, do I really have to specify that shit for you?"

"Yes, actually," says Rose. "Although really the person to be clarifying your 'relationship' with should be the suitor in question." Dave plants his face directly into his hands. There’s so much bullshit swirling around him that next season's crop are bound to be plentiful. "And in all my years of literary experience I have never seen the word 'coupling' used in anything less than the entirely non-platonic sense."

"Well maybe I'm trying to break some linguistic rules here, Rose, did you ever think of fucking that?"

"I can't say it's ever crossed my mind," she replies, smile as smug as he's ever seen it, "though now that you've brought it up, the feasibility of fucking linguistic violations is worth spending some time considering."

"Well, if anyone's gonna somehow manage to fuck a metaphysical concept it's gonna be you," says Dave, graciously. "Remember to credit me in whatever published work comes outta that experience."

"Yours will be the first copy I sign," she assures him.

"What about my copy?" asks Jade, apparently now tired of watching the Lalider twins go at it—which is, in fact, one of her favourite pastimes, even if it tends to get out of hand pretty quickly. Like a really slippery, logorrheic eel.

"I have two hands," says Rose, smiling at her. "Both are equally capable of fulfilling obligations to friends."

"Gross," is the only input Dave has to offer.

"Hey," says John, shifting on the end of the couch which is where he's obviously been sitting for the entire conversation, weren't you paying attention? "If poker is completely off the table, could I make a suggestion for a card game?"

"Fifty-Two Pickup," says Dave immediately from beside him.

John makes a face at him. "Um, no??"

"Yeah, I totally believe that the oldest trick in your book wasn't gonna be your suggestion."

"Jeez, what happened to our 'healthy relationship', Dave?? I thought you'd at least believe me when I say that I wasn't going to make a silly joke like that!"

"For shame," adds Rose.

"Gosh, Dave, have some faith in John!" Jade says, not even trying to hide her smile.

"Oh my actual god. Listen, I have so much faith in John I could start my own fucking Church of Egbert. Our weekly hymn would be the Ghostbusters’ theme, and the stained glass windows would depict Nicholas Cage and Matthew McConahey in various poses of manly broffection—"

"McConaughey," corrects John.

"You can't correct the spelling of shit I'm saying aloud," says Dave.

"You ALWAYS spell his name wrong. You did it just then, too, I can tell!!"

"Oh man, is your Mickonahay spell-o-meter going off the charts again?"

"Ok you just went completely out of your way to butcher the pronunciation!!!"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, you didn't let me finish. Where was I up to?"

"Windows and manly bro-affection," offers Jade.

"Oh right. Uh. Shit, man, I actually don't know enough about Catholic churches to finish this spiel."

"Would it be Catholic if your god was John?" asks Rose, and Dave shrugs.

"I mean, no? But hey look where we are again, on the conversationally asinine train going to buttfuck nowhere, last stop, five minutes ago. John, make your Fifty-Two Pickup joke so we can move this thing along."

"It's not really a joke if you've already spoiled the punchline," says John.

"Tell that to Updog," Rose says.

Jade looks at her, confused. "What's—"

"JADE NO!" yell Dave and John in unison, and Rose hides her laughter behind a hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo also btw idk how long it's gonna be before i actually establish all these in the fic itself: jade and john are mixed black/polynesian and dave and rose are mixed latinx/japanese. just so u know what to imagine lmfao


	2. bigfoot is real (but you can only see her if you let your best friend win at monopoly at 7 pm on a sunday)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry that this chapter is so short!!! i have like a few thousand extra words that could've gone in here already written, but i wanna redo some of it and i don't want to leave all five of the people actually reading this (i see you and i love you) hanging for too long like a destitute piñata in the party section of a kmart or whatever. so i guess you'll just have to wait to see that 'underage drinking' tag come into play until next time lol 
> 
> ALSO happy birthday john egbert and jane crocker!!! and happy 4/13 yall, here's to another year of hell
> 
> oh and that link later in the chapt goes to the mspa page in case you forgot where that modus shows up in canon :)

The next time they're all together, it's when Jade and John cash out on the tickets Rose—and Dave—got them for John's birthday. They fly in two months after John's seventeenth, and find Lalonde manor as hospitable as the last time they visited. Several days after their arrival, the both of them—and Dave—are following Rose down a long, twisting path through the woods near her house. Somewhere off to the side, beyond the thick line of dark trees, they can hear water crashing.

"So how far to this swimming hole now, Rose?" John asks, ducking under another intruding tree limb. He swears these things are trying to attack him.

"Not far." Rose is several feet ahead, a towel draped around her head and shoulders like a cloak—if cloaks resembled bright orange traffic cones. A sarong, matching the towel in both hue and ludicrous visibility, is wrapped low around her hips over pink floral-print shorts and a dark green bikini top. The colours clash to an almost obnoxious degree, but Rose just stone cold does not give a shit. Even Dave's colour scheme is more appealing; white singlet over red shorts, though, admittedly, the SB&HJ-printed binder he's wearing underneath is such a delightful assault on the eyes John is almost glad his friend is lagging behind the rest of the party so he doesn't have to make eye contact with a poorly-rendered MSPaint squirrel.

"Wow," says Jade from just behind Rose. She doesn't seem to be suffering from a mad attack of the trees like John is, skipping over fallen branches and occasionally swinging off the odd low-hanging limb. "It's only been, what, four years and the forest's already completely recovered! I haven't seen a single burnt tree out here."

"That's likely because my mother had the burnt trees uprooted and replaced," says Rose. "Much of the forest you see here was transplanted from donor populations upstate."

"Yeah," adds Dave. "Dear ol' Mom's a stickler for having shit neat and tidy."

"Well, that and she required healthy trees to experiment on. I believe her most recent patent had something to do with a synthetic fire-retardant designed specifically for use on plants."

"Actually, she got done with that one like a few months back. Her MOST recent patent was that hypo-allergenic cat breed," says Dave. "It was pretty cool actually, she engineered them to be like, living antihistamine machines so those unlucky fucks with a metric shitload of other allergies don't have tomumblemumble..." His explanation is lost to the world as he slowly descends into excited muttering.

"Yes," says Rose, once it's clear that Dave's comprehensibility has jumped out the window to its messy death on the pavement below. "Thank you for that endearing correction. We’re all better people for having heard every word."

"You're welcome," he replies, insincerity brimming from him like an overfilled cup. The cup—as the quote from Homer's _Odyssey_ goes—runneth over. That is almost certainly a quote from _Odyssey_.

"You know," says Jade, "you don't have to mumble when you're talking about science stuff. Even if some of us—" she clears her throat roughly into a hand, and what comes out sounds suspiciously like 'John', "—don't quite get it, it's still really nice and sweet to hear you talking about something you love!"

"Hey!" says John, laughing. "I totally get science stuff! I know ALL about science, believe me."

"Oh yeah?" Jade says, turning around and walking backwards to grin at him from under the brim of her comically large straw hat. "Then... what's the difference between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, hmm?" Well, now she's just showing off—she's walking backwards down a path that almost promises pain and tree-based incidents to John when he's walking normally.

"Well that's obvious," he says. "Um... clearly classical mechanics are mechanics who work on physical things, like old cars, while quantum mechanics are people who work on, hmm, theoretical things. Obviously!!!"

Rose laughs. "How unfortunate. I was about to add that I don't quite 'get science stuff' either. At least not with regards to such fields as biology and physics," she admits. "Though it appears I'm the only one without a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Suddenly I feel like the weak mental link in our group’s collective chain."

"Aw, no Rose, I was only joking!" says John, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "I'm not really the sciencey type."

"Could've fooled me," she replies.

"Had me convinced," adds Dave.

"You were only joking???" asks Jade, forcing a shocked expression and even adding a loud gasp for effect. " _Mon Dieu!!_ "

Rose's soft chuckle echoes off the trees, and suddenly the forest feels a little less empty than it did just a few minutes ago. "I'm glad to see the French lessons are paying off."

"Yeah totally! I know ' _mon Dieu_ ' and how to say 'thank you', but I'm still uncertain about adding the 'very much' just in case I get the pronunciation wrong and compliment someone's ass," Jade says, turning back around and falling into step with Rose.

"It's pronounced ' _merci beaucoup_ '," says Rose, enunciating carefully. Just for clarification, she is most certainly not saying 'thank you very much'.

" _Merci beaucoup_?" Jade asks, mimicking her perfectly. Rose looks at her and finds her smirk mirrored on Jade's face.

"Yeah, murky bockup," says Dave, ruining the moment.

"Actually yes, you're right," says Rose, amused despite herself. "I was entirely wrong. Murky bockup is definitely correct."

"Okay but wait, why does that nearly mean 'nice ass'??" John asks.

"It's just the pronunciation of ' _beaucoup_ '," says Dave, his hand gestures flippant. "Only native English speakers really have the problem because of the way we form vowels and shit, but some people try to pronounce it like ' _beaucoup_ ' which basically translates to a sorta rude butt-based compliment, instead of ' _beaucoup_ ', which is 'very much'. Ya gotta get the ' _coup_ ' of ' _beaucoup_ ' like ' _coup_ ' rather than ' _coup_ '. Not really difficult if you know what the fuck you're doing, 'cause ' _coup_ ' sounds nothin' like ' _coup_ ' unless you're an idiot who wants to get backhanded with a baguette or something."

"Ohh," says John. "Well, boy am I glad to have heard you say that all out loud and clear and stuff! If I'd had to read that sentence transcribed by like, some dick of an author who didn't include phonetic descriptions or whatever, I'd be really confused."

"Oh dude, I know right. That'd be one fuck of a metaphorical doozy right there."

"Pleasing posteriors and unreliable transcribers aside, we're here," Rose says as they round a corner and come out from between two large, twisted trees. The area opens up into a secluded riverside, pebbles shifting underfoot and easing into sand as they near the water. The rocks on either side are high and climbable; Jade eyes them and wonders if the river runs as deep as the sea around her island. Probably not, but hopefully it'll be safe to fling herself off them like she's performing an acrobatic fucking cannonball off the handle. Dave eyes the rocks and wonders if he'll find more fossils in them today. John and Rose are more interested in the water, and ditch their things in the shade of the treeline before heading in.

Rose takes her time and lets John go ahead, watching him jump in with the patient humour of someone waiting for a joke to unfold.

"FUCK! It's cold!!!" he yells, scrambling out of the water and sending it splashing around his thighs. It is exactly the punchline she expected.

"No it isn't," calls Jade, already standing atop one of the smaller rocks.

"You aren't even in the water!" John yells back. Jade's response takes the form of a perfectly executed forward flip into the river, and the resulting waves hit John with all the precision of a dart hitting the bullseye.

 

It takes nearly twenty minutes for everyone to be in the water. John was the second to go fully under, dunked mercilessly by a tag-team of Dave and Jade—Dave distracts him while Jade swims up behind, like one of those killer mermaids people like to rant about on the Discovery Channel, and drags him backwards into the water. Rose would argue that Dave went under next, but he would just as vehemently disagree; they really fell in together, with Dave botching his attempt to pick her up and fling her into the water and getting pulled along for the ride by an indignant Rose. Once in the water, she immediately takes control by clambering up his body and forcing herself onto his shoulders. He lets it happen with a sigh, more intent on keeping his shades on his face and his feet on the river floor even as she takes handfuls of his sopping hair like she's trying re-enact the entire Ratatouille movie and he's the poor gangly chef. He says as much and she tugs his head back to glare into his eyes from above, her sodden hair dripping water on his face as he snorts.

"I can’t say I quite appreciate being likened to a _rat_ ," she says, "though I have to admit, the resemblance between you and that puppet of a sous chef is almost uncanny." Then she takes the roots of his hair in her fists and smiles. "And I quite enjoy pulling your strings."

He grimaces, and her grin widens until she realises that he's tipping them both back into the water, and she goes under with a shriek. Dave sacrifices himself for the sake of revenge, and John and Jade have to agree that his death is heroic by every definition of the word.

 

"So," says Jade some time later, swimming up behind Rose and looping her arms around her shoulders, "where are the best places to jump off those rocks?"

Rose places a hand over one of Jade's, keeping her arms locked around her as she scans the shore and considers. "Most of the rocks overlook the deeper parts of the river, so at the very least any place is relatively safe..." She continues to think for a moment, letting Jade hold her up in the water as she gives herself a rest from swimming. Whenever she and Dave come down here, it's usually for the purpose of scouring the rocks for fossilised sea life or hoping to be inspired out of the hapless depths of writer's block by a watery muse—Rose doesn't think she's jumped from them more than once before. "Besides that, I wouldn't know."

"Sounds like I'm going to have to figure this out for myself," says Jade, and Rose can see her grin in her periphery. Jade pulls away, and Rose suddenly feels much, much colder without her warmth at her back. "John! Come throw yourself off some rocks with me!"

"Sounds great," he yells back from the other side of the river where he's sitting on the beach with Dave, combing through the stones. He stands and Dave looks over, making eye contact with Rose as their respective Egbarleys ditch them in the pursuit of extreme sports. He still, after all these years, doesn’t quite know how she always meets his eyes despite distance and dark shades, but she does so with unerring precision. Much like her vaguely unnerving precognition—which she often tries to pass off as simple acuity, because of course she fucking does—it’s sort of just something he’s come to terms with as a fact of life. Really, he doesn’t mind it as much as he sometimes feels he should. He could think of it as a threat; a crack in the walls between him and the world. But he doesn’t. It’s almost nice to think that someone can find him, even when he hides. It’s a comfort to think that there’s really something there to _find_.

 

“Hold on, Jade!” John says, trying to find footing in the rock face. She’s already made her way up to a shelf in the rock above him, and she waits for him patiently.

“Ok, put your foot there,” she finally says, after watching him deliberate for a few seconds too long. “And your hand… there.” She directs him up to her, before reaching out and almost lifting him clean off the rock with both hands. He sets his feet on the shelf, and she lets go of him and starts moving again, edging around the side to overlook the water. John stays where he is for a minute, catching his breath and admiring the modest view. The shelf overlooks the entire beach, and he waves to Dave and Rose, finally calling out to break their attention away from whatever they’re looking at in those rocks on the other side of the river. They wave back, and he turns to follows Jade. She’s somehow made her way up a path that looks like it was carved out by goats, and he has no idea how she can be walking barefoot over the craggy rock with nary a pained wince.

“Are you sure you don’t want to borrow my shoes?” he asks, and not for the first time. “I mean, I know you pretty much never wear shoes on your island, but I don’t want you to fall and get hurt or something.”

Jade laughs. “Is offering a girl your shoes a big thing in that Gentleman’s Handbook of yours?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so? I haven’t really read all of it yet.”

“Hahaha, what? I was only kidding but do you actually have one of those?”

“It was one of the birthday presents I got from my dad,” he says, and Jade stops to wait for him at another outcrop, toes digging into a patch of dirt piled up on the rock.

“Ohh, yeah, that makes sense.” She holds out her hand and tugs him up the makeshift path towards her, momentum nearly sending them tumbling. He trips over one of his own feet when they stumble backwards and falls onto her as she’s regaining her balance. He finds himself ensconced in strong, sun-warmed arms, and with his cheek pressed against her chest he can feel her laughter rumble like thunder. “You alright?” she asks, and her voice thrums. It’s the first moment he’s ever found himself comparing Jade to a cat—nothing besides a purr quite does her vibrato justice.

“Yeah,” he says, suddenly breathless in a way that strikes him as ironic, but he can’t quite explain why. The feeling fades after a moment and he figures he’s been spending too much time on Dave’s blogs again. Jade shifts and he steps back, but when he tries to pull his hands away she catches one in her own and turns, pulling him after her with a grin.

They manage to make their way to what seems to be the highest point on the rocks without further issue. Jade stands on the edge and John steps up beside her, both too close to the precipice for the comfort of any normal person, but they’ve never been especially normal when it comes to open air and long drops and high places. If Dave were here he’d likely snap out some very pessimistic words about death and the danger of falling and probably yank them back by their wrists—if Rose were here she’d probably stay several feet behind them and only voice her concerns under the guise of a few sardonic jokes. But they aren’t. It’s just Jade and John and a cool breeze neither of them had noticed earlier on the ground. From up here, the water is clear and sparkling, light glinting off ripples and bleaching the rocks and turning the river every shade of green and blue their eyes can parse. It is, admittedly, a very long drop.

“Isn’t this a little… high?” John asks, but there’s no real hesitance in his voice.

“Scared?” she asks him, smiling at his suddenly disgruntled expression. “I’m literally holding your hand right now, I don’t know what else I can do to comfort you!”

“No way,” he says. “I just thought you wanted to do cannonballs and flips and things, not a bungee jump without the rope.”

“So you’re not up for a skydive without the parachute?” she asks, and swings their hands back and forth, rocking back on her heels as she snickers.

“Nope, sorry Jade! Dad would kill me if I died out here. Even if it was in the arms of a pretty lady.”

“Aw,” she says, and bumps his shoulder with her own. “Well, you won’t be dying on my watch, mister. And it isn’t really that big of a drop anyway, I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

John turns and looks at her, and he likes the way the sun bounces off her glasses and makes her eyes glow an almost supernatural green. Like the green of the slimer ghost shirt he used to wear as a kid, except more vibrant and alive. Her dimples flash as she laughs, and her hair falls around her face, messy and tangled and shiny in the light. His hand tightens around hers almost imperceptibly, and he wonders if he’s the only one in their group who doesn’t have calluses.

“Do you… wanna jump, then?” she asks, and the question is lilted with a growing concern. “We can find a smaller rock, if you want—”

“No no, this is fine!” He captchalogues his glasses and smiles, tugging her hand towards him and out, like he’s throwing something for a dog to fetch. It would have to be a pretty water-oriented dog though, really, considering he’d be chucking it into the river below, but he thinks Bec likes swimming? He’s pretty sure Jade’s told him about that before. “I think that you’ve jumped off more cliffs than I have, so if you say it is safe then I believe you.”

She captchalogues her own, blinking as his face goes blurry and the trees descend into a muddy smudge around them. “If you’re sure?”

He smiles, and she squints at him, bringing that shit-eating, prank-incoming grin into focus, before he says, “Scared?” and jumps.

She goes falling with him, over the edge, the wind tugging her hair into flight like a cloud of disgruntled black birds as his laughter rings in her ears. The world blurs past in a rush of colour and John, beside her, becomes the only thing she can see. They hit the water a moment later, but it’s long enough for her to look at him—really look at him—and see the way his eyes light up like neon signs, flashing blue like a clear sky. His grin is blinding and unrestrained, so unlike Rose’s controlled smiles or Dave’s ‘cool’ half-smirks; John’s expression is nearly a mirror of hers. He meets her gaze the second before they’re interrupted by the vehement backhand of cold water, and something in her burns low and warm, like the rising feeling you get in your chest when you’re looking at puppies through the window of a pet store. Then the world is hard and cold and muffled, and air escapes her mouth in a giddy rush of bubbles. Somehow during the impact she’d lost her grip on his hand, so she floats alone for a moment while her hair drifts like tendrils around her. She shoves it from her face and searches the water, trying to find John beyond a white churning wall of froth. It’s futile, of course; the visibility down here is shit, water dark and blinding all at once. Jade doesn’t know how deep she’s gone, but the silence is kind of nice and the cold seems almost comforting, so she stays until her lungs start to burn and then launches herself at the surface.

She breaks it in an explosion of noise and light and air, and all at once the world rushes back into her. She takes gulping breaths and shoves her hair from her face again.

“Jade!” John calls, and she spins around to watch him waving at her from just a few feet away, glasses already back on. She snorts. He looks ridiculous with his hair plastered to his face like that.

“John! Wasn’t that fun?” she asks, wiping water from her eyes before swimming closer, closing the gap between them.

“Definitely! I loooove leaping off cliffs into freezing cold water, how could I not?” He grins, eyes scrunched, in that oh-so-subtle way of his when he’s trying to make his sarcasm as clear as possible. Jade laughs and splashes water at him.

“So you’re up for more then? Great!” she says, and when he tries to jokingly complain she swims in even closer and whispers, nose-to-nose, “Unless you’re… scared?”

He makes a face and squirts a handful of river water at her with some weird hand trick thing that she hasn’t figured out how to do. She makes an equally unimpressed face at him and spits a mouthful of water right back, and he splashes away, disgusted. “Gross! Don’t drink the water, Jade, bluh!!!”

“Bluh???” she asks, uncaptchaloguing her own glasses and putting them on.

“Yes, bluh!!!” He swims back and grabs for her hands. “Here, look, I’ll show you how to do it so you don’t go swallowing a bunch of river water, you nasty water sprite.”

“Water sprite?” she asks, watching him as he shifts her hands into position just below the water’s surface.

“Yeah. They’re like, sort of fairy people who live in streams and things.” She likes the little lopsided smile that appears when he talks about this sort of stuff. He’s always been into cryptozoology and mythology, but he’s been especially fascinated by it recently—the last time she stayed at his house they’d both fallen asleep watching _Finding Bigfoot_. He’s asked her more than once if there might be anything of the scientifically weird persuasion on her island, but she’s pretty sure everything on it is normal! Admittedly her definition of ‘normal’ isn’t quite textbook, but even if there was something of interest there, John’s father has always been concerned about her method of transportation. He’s maintained for years that John has to find his own way to the island, even though her plane is perfectly safe and reliable! Jade built it herself, after all. Fathers are so confusing.

“Aren’t those like selkies?” she asks, keeping her smile small as she enjoys the warmth of his hands on hers. They’re so soft! She figures that playing the piano doesn’t really build up the sorts of calluses you get from the violin or bass. Even Rose’s hands are more banged up than his. John’s hands are bigger, though, as big as her own, with broad palms and short, thick fingers. His fingernails are wide and flat, and still have the remnants of blue nail polish in his cuticles from two months ago.

“Oh my god, Jade, no. Okay so selkies live primarily in the sea, and they’re like humans who wear seal skins so they can turn into seals and swim around and stuff, they’re NOTHING like water sprites at all. Water sprites are basically just kind of elemental spirits, so they’re less physical than people make out selkies to be. But wait, there you go, now try squishing your hands together like this,” he says, and she’s so distracted by his little grin that she didn’t even realise he was pointing her hand-water-gun at her own face until she gets hit by a jet of water. Again.

“Egbeerrrttt!!!!” she splutters, glaring at him as he laughs and swims away, trying to escape her oncoming wrath. He isn’t fast enough; strong swimming doesn’t run in the family like pranking does, and she dunks John under before he even realises she’s behind him.

 

“Stop being distracted by them and come check out this trilobite,” says Dave.

“I’m afraid that on this occasion I find the shenanigans of two wholly innocent teenagers more entertaining than the prospect of some million-year-old arthropod,” Rose replies, reclining on the rocks closer to the water.

“Rude.”

“Don’t even hate,” she says, keeping her eyes on the two in the water. Rose can’t quite make out what they’re discussing beyond indignant shrieks of each other’s names, but from the look on Jade’s face whatever John was talking about earlier must have been quite enthralling. Although, admittedly, Jade does like to indulge her friends’ excited babbling about their personal interests, so perhaps John was talking about _Sharknado_.

“Also, since when are John and Jade innocent? John I get, but Jade? Last week she sent me a link to a full episode of _The Squiddles_ she’d found on Pornhub.”

“She sent you that too?”

“Shit. See what I mean?” The idle sound of his chisel cracking into stone is carried down to her on a gentle breeze, and she frowns. Whatever snippet of conversation she might have heard from them is snatched away by the wind. Her attempts at good-natured eavesdropping, foiled again by the ash-blackened hand of fate.

“I was more referring to the way they interact,” she says. “Whenever they’re together they seem to revert to their thirteen-year-old selves. It’s quite endearing.”

“Aw shit, you’re not crushing on both of them now are you?”

“Tell me Dave, have you ever come across a little thing called ‘hypocrisy’?”

“Yeah he was that old Greek guy right. Invented hospitals or something.”

“Probably.”

The silence that follows is an overstuffed satin pillow, sewn together by the clumsy hands of a child. It finally bursts at the seams when Dave says, “And I’m not ‘crushing’ on ‘both of them’, by the way. I’m not an eighth-grader who can’t pick and choose and is also really fucking lame on the side for kicks.”

“Then who  _are_ you crushing on?” Her voice is smug around the edges and the sound of chisel on rock ceases. She knows he’s probably pulling some sort of face at her now, but she still doesn’t turn around.

“I’m not playin’ this game with you, Lalonde. We ain’t kids on a sleepover, even if I am the undefeated fucking king of pillow fights.”

“You don’t play _any_ games with me these days,” she says, and he can’t figure out if the wistful tone in her voice is genuine or not.

“‘Cause you always cheat.”

“Only when the rules are boring.”

“Rose, you cheat in _chess_.”

“That was one time! Admittedly, not my proudest hour.” Then, “The rules of chess _are_ boring, though.”

She hears a loud, exaggerated gasp. “Never have I heard a more offensive fucking thing come out of your filthy-ass mouth, Rosie. That’s crossing a line.”

She snorts at the nickname. “I’ve never cheated in Monopoly,” she offers, and he finally laughs at that. His laughter is a broken, huffing thing, more often than not curled at the edges with something akin to bitterness, but it’s always nice to hear.

“Oh shit, there’s an idea. Think we should bust it out and remind John and Jade who the superior real estate moguls are again?”

“Given that it’s been a year since we last played, I’m sure they’ve had enough time to recover from their legendary defeat at our hands. Perhaps their shared unwavering optimism will fool them into believing they have a chance of ending our winning streak this time.”

“Then it’s a date.” She hears a muttered ‘oh, shit’ when he realises what he just said, and tries to muffle her laughter. “I mean—not a date, like not in sense that, fuck, goddammit Rose you know what I mean, it’s a completely socially acceptable phrase, don’t read into it.”

She finally tilts her head back to look at him around the brim of Jade’s hat, and snickers. His aggrieved expression is just as entertaining as she’d imagined.

“WHAT’S SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE??” Jade fucking bellows from the other side of the river, where she’s got John in a headlock for some reason.

“How did she even hear you?” Dave asks. “Girl must have ears like a hawk.”

“Hawks _are_ widely renowned for their impressive hearing.”

“WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT HAWKS?” John yells, voice hoarse around Jade’s arm.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Dave, and Rose agrees.

 

“John, you chicken fried fuck, you can’t just whip three grand from your ass like that,” Dave says, much later when they’re all crowded round a Monopoly board the living room. He glares down at John’s outstretched hand and the wad of brightly coloured money it proffers. “Goddammit, you were supposed to mortgage all your shit to pay rent—I don’t charge exorbitant prices just so you can cough up the cash like it ain’t no skin off your prodigal nose.”

“What’s that, Dave? You don’t want my money? Ok then, even though I know you need it I’ll just keep it—”

“Like hell you will, hand it over.”

Rose looks up from where’s Jade is painting her nails, trying to rectify the mess their owner left them in when Rose tried to paint them herself. “Oh good, you can finally settle that debt you owe me.”

Dave turns his glare on Rose, sifting through the notes and jamming them under his thigh with the rest of his dwindling cash stash. “I _thought_ that loan was given in good fuckin’ faith, Rose, though I don’t know why I ever thought you’d be so uncharacteristically magnanimous without any sorta ulterior motive.”

“What sort of business partner would I be if I didn’t encourage trustworthy monetary habits in my associate?”

“Oh lemme think, a _nice_ one??”

“Success deals with no such moral qualms, Dave.”

“Shit, well I’m sorry, I didn’t know I needed to write up a fucking contract and read the fine print just to have my sister loan me some godforsaken Monopoly money without any underhanded caveats. We’re supposed to be a team but here you are, exploiting my poor, penurious ass like a sadistic loan shark. You’ll get your damn money, _Rose_ , but it’ll be blood money. My kids will live and fucking die on the streets just to pay off their late father’s crippling boardgame debts. You’re the worst aunt any Oliver Twist-looking motherfuckers could have and I hope you know it.”

“You say that as though in the case of your untimely paternal demise, I wouldn’t snatch up your children to proselytize them in the ways of the Lalonde family,” she says. “Of course I would take care of the undoubtedly numerous nieces, nephews, and whatever the gender-neutral term for ‘fruit of my brother’s loins’ is—letting them perish on Monopoly’s cruel boardwalks would be a waste of our genes. Besides,” she adds, turning back and watching Jade carefully add white dots to the eyes of the pastel Squiddles she’s been painting on Rose’s nails, “I have no doubt you’ll repay me long before you rear young. Or die. Even if the payment has to take place outside of this particular game.”

He sends her a disgusted look. “Look, whatever. Your roll, Jade.”

Jade looks up and blinks, multi-lensed goggles still wrapped around her head. She flicks the extras up, suddenly looking more like Jade Harley and less like a steampunk jewelry appraiser, and rolls the dice with one hand. The other she keeps under Rose’s. Within the space of a turn, she plants hotels on all nine of her remaining properties, evades police custody, and lands neatly in the last free space on the board—which she then, naturally, buys immediately.

Within the space of the next turn, she manages to bankrupt Dave.

Rose looks at the minefield of hotels, and exchanges a glance with her jilted colleague. Her mind ticks over. Would it be better to fold? To lose with some dignity and take hostage the Harleybert’s chance to feel genuine triumph? Perhaps choosing to secede now, while she still holds a fair number of unmortgaged homes and one fat stack of cash large enough to crush an unsuspecting piggy bank to death, would be her last assured saving grace.

Backing down, however, is not the Lalonde way. Wrecking shit and taking names is. So she locks eyes with Jade, keeping John in her periphery, and rolls. The following rounds leave both her pride and her wet nail polish unmarred.

Then John makes a lethal mistake and falls to her three-tiered green properties.

“Dave,” she says, after risking an addition to Jade’s wrath by high-fiving him, “would you be a dear and collect my spoils for me?”

He snorts. “I guess since you’re so awful and helpless with your shitty wet nails then sure.” His own nail polish is several days old, red varnish thoroughly chipped—likely from his endless fidgeting. He captchalogues John’s messy pile of cards and money, and then dumps the jar’s contents directly into her lap. _God_ , she hates his fucking preservative modus; formaldehyde-filled jars are fine for storing his dead shit, but not _Monopoly cards_. Even if the ‘formaldehyde’ isn’t actually formaldehyde, and dries almost on contact, leaving carpet, upholstery, clothing, and captchalogued items completely clean, it’s still _incredibly_ annoying. She’s certain he keeps hold of the modus just to spite her. As a passive-aggressive rejoinder, she employs the [ tech-hop modus ](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006433). Its occasional lack of functionality (example: the fact that she currently has to pronounce ‘knitting’ like ‘knittin’ ’ to rhyme it with ‘mitten’ so she can hold an in-progress shawl and a pair of woolen fingerless gloves) is entirely made up for by the look on Dave’s face every time she raps a few lines of poetry to retrieve an item.

He ignores the unimpressed face she makes at him, opting instead to snap a picture of the totalled board game and uploading it to one of his blogs. She doesn’t bother checking which one; she’s sure her phone is lighting up with an appropriate notification in her sylladex. Instead, she turns her attention back to her one remaining opponent. Jade’s eyes have a dangerous glow to them, playful and calculating and _incredibly_ attractive. Dave grimaces at the way Rose shifts in response—her smile widens and her head tilts, looking up at Jade through dark lashes as her typically perfect posture slackens in increments. She’s all smirk and coiled muscle, like a cat in human form, and it suits her so much he has to swallow hard and look away. Rose and Jade don’t notice, caught up in their whole eyefucking rivalry bullshit.

“It’s on, Lalonde,” says Jade, trying to look serious, but her expression makes John laugh and even Dave snorts at what he could've sworn was a Batman impersonation.

“The use of an opponent’s last name is a distancing strategy, Jade,” Rose says, and everyone in the room ignores the sudden disquieting urge to rub at the goosebumps that raise on their skin when Rose’s voice goes low and teasing like that. Except for John, actually, who scratches the back of his neck and shrugs off the feeling. He didn’t think it was that cold in here, but Rose’s house is pretty big and drafty, so maybe it isn't that surprising. He idly sifts through his sylladex while the girls talk in the background, trying to remember if he has a sweater somewhere in that magic hat. Damn. He must’ve left it in his suitcase upstairs. He retrieves his phone instead, and opens up Pesterchum.

 

GT: hey do you have a jacket or something i can borrow? 

TG: what 

TG: are you serious 

TG: dude youre sitting like two feet away from me 

TG: can you really not be assed to just speak out loud like a normal human being 

GT: no i could, but jade and rose really seem to be going at it! i don’t want to ruin the mood or something stupid like that. 

TG: theyre going at it alright 

TG: but anyway do you realise youre like the poster boy for those millennial news articles 

TG: you know the ones wedged between superfood clickbait and personality quizzes that tell you which kardashian you are or whatever 

TG: titled like 

TG: Teenagers Have Spoken! The New Mode of Communication is Shitty Outdated IM Apps 

TG: or like 

TG: Millennials Ruining the First Amendment by Typing Instead of Talking - Free Speech Has Been Replaced by Emojis 

GT: oh man, have you been reading the onion again? 

TG: dude dont josh the onion 

GT: i’m gonna josh the onion. 

TG: dont freaking do it man what did i just say 

GT: haha ok, but seriously. jacket? sweater?? hoodie?? 

GT: ””ironic”” letterman jersey thing???????? 

TG: damn are you really cold enough to necessitate eight question marks 

GT: yes. 

TG: why eight 

GT: uhh. i don’t know? i didn’t exactly count them out as i typed them or anything. 

TG: well shit alright 

TG: whatever you say man 

TG: freshly preserved jacket coming up 

GT: wait no, don’t pour it on me!! your modus is so gross dude. 

GT: but also kind of cool in a weird, morbid way, so that’s ok. 

TG: why would i pour it on you 

GT: you always do it to rose. i’ve sort of been expecting you to just up end a jar on me for a while now. 

TG: nah 

TG: rose is fun to mess with but you arent really 

TG: besides i gotta have some sort of comeback to her whole poetry modus bullfuckery 

TG: she uses it JUST to fuck with me 

TG: you know her modus was designed to be used by like actual professional rappers?? 

GT: like who? 

TG: idk 

TG: obama probably 

TG: haha i bet he totally has a techhop modus 

TG: dude that would be so sweet 

TG: he probably doesnt emily dickinson it up like she does 

TG: she emily dickinsons all over the joint like its going out of style and shes some small town boutique instagram novice all covered in bows and filtered to hell and back 

TG: solely for the purpose of screwing me 

TG: i actually have no idea how she got her hands on the fucking thing either 

TG: its supposed to be like top shelf reserved for professionals only 

TG: like donald fucking glover and george watsky and some other rapper guys i totally know the names of but are too obscure to mention by handle 

GT: um………… 

TG: what 

GT: “screwing you”? :P 

TG: oh for fucks 

TG: screwing WITH** me 

TG: **WITH ME*** 

GT: ok, good haha. 

GT: that’s hilarious even if it’s kind of weird. 

TG: oh my god 

TG: it was an honest mistake 

TG: see even now shes in my head its so fucking annoying 

GT: hahahaha! oh man, rose is going to love this. 

TG: what no shes not 

TG: because you arent telling her about this shell be so on my ass about it 

TG: it was just a slip of the tongue man 

TG: or fingers i mean 

TG: a NON SUGGESTIVE slip of the tongue and or fingers 

TG: we all get those 

TG: i mean no one can really derive any sort of meaningful info out of a slip up like that 

GT: well, rose probably could, for one. 

TG: no one who isnt awful i mean 

GT: see, that right there was so rude i think i will have to tell rose about your slip up! 

GT: in fact i might just copy paste this whole pesterlog to her. 

TG: no john oh my god you dont understand the sort of material youll be giving her 

TG: she ran out of my pilfered dream journals months back 

GT: no, i will tell her. 

GT: unless!!!! 

TG: unless what 

TG: dont leave me hanging dude im on the edge of my fucking seat here 

TG: i can see you just sitting there not typing john come on 

TG: no dont turn your phone on its side 

TG: john 

TG: john if youre fucking playing the sims freeplay im gonna lose it 

TG: john 

TG: john 

TG: john i swear to fuck ill do something if youre playing sims freeplay instead of answering me 

TG: i KNOW youre getting these i can see you swiping them away you little shit 

TG: john 

TG: ill tell rose and jade about your deviantart account 

TG: ill tell them 

TG: ill do it dont test me 

TG: AND 

TG: ill tell them about new years 

GT: what about new years? 

TG: what do you mean what about new years 

GT: i mean what would you tell them about it? 

GT: i’m pretty sure they already know it exists, dave. :P 

TG: no what the fuck 

TG: im not talking about the event itself john im talking about the goddamn thing that happened that one time 

GT: “that one time”? 

TG: holy shit 

TG: dont play the lovable idiot card you know exactly what im talking about 

TG: dont make me spell this out for you 

TG: you know 

TG: best night of your fucking life 

GT: um... 

TG: dont tell me you actually forgot 

TG: im gonna be so heartbroken you dont even know 

GT: OH! you mean the kiss? 

TG: snddk 

TG: YES i mean the fucking kiss holy shit 

TG: why did that take so long for you to figure out jesus christ 

GT: well, i don’t know. it isn’t really much of a threat? 

TG: why not 

TG: you were like hells of embarrassed about it at the time 

GT: no i wasn’t. you were the one who freaked out about it, lol. 

GT: you sooo lost your cool! 

TG: did not 

GT: did too! 

GT: you were ranting on about how ironic it was to mock holiday traditions by reenacting them facetiously or something, for like twenty minutes afterwards. 

GT: and for another ten minutes you came up with fifty different ways to say ‘no homo’. 

TG: yeah well 

TG: i was an idiot fourteen year old ok i hadnt gotten around to figuring some shit out 

TG: internalised homophobia gets to the best of us 

TG: and for the record you totally pulled that no homo shit yourself 

GT: well, yeah, but i’m still not gay. whereas you... 

TG: yeah yeah shut up we get it youre straight whatever 

TG: time to throw another we dont care about your heterosexuality party 

TG: gonna cut into the cake and instead of rainbow sponge cake its just gonna be black and white layers like the shittiest oreo ever 

TG: well all sign cards with comments like 

TG: congrats on not having your life endangered by your orientation 

TG: good job on being legally allowed to marry your future girlfriend anywhere in the world 

TG: were so proud that popular media caters to your every goddamn whim while we lgbt crowd have gotta search the background for two poorly rendered characters with short hair holding hands for representation 

TG: now someone light up the confetti cannon and lets get this show on the road 

GT: are you done? 

TG: no 

TG: we got presents to hand out yet 

GT: oh, great. 

TG: yeah 

TG: hey check it the first ones a framed photo of some hot celebrity chick 

TG: like uh 

TG: john which celebrity do you find hottest 

GT: umm… i don’t know? 

TG: cmon john youre the heterosexual in this relationship help a bro out here 

TG: what do you straight guys like these days 

GT: dave, you like girls too! 

TG: shh this isnt about me 

TG: now tell me which hollywood actress gets you hardest 

GT: dave, gross. 

TG: im talking rock fuckin solid here 

TG: hard enough to break through bricks and knock down walls 

TG: get yourself a job in construction and replace the wrecking ball with your hulkish spam porpoise 

TG: allocate your dick to your strife specibus and really knock out the ladies with your meaty crotch fist 

GT: hahahaha oh my god, stop. 

GT: you know i can’t handle your fucking ridiculous dick synonyms. 

TG: dude i know im funny but you dont have to type out your hahas to me 

TG: i can see you giggling away hysterically to yourself 

TG: anyway but for reals though 

TG: who do you like 

TG: which celebrity i mean 

GT: uhh… 

GT: scarlett johansson? 

TG: jesus 

TG: seriously 

GT: i don’t know! you’re kind of putting me on the spot here. 

GT: isn’t she a pretty popular one? 

TG: well yeah i guess but im not asking for a general fucking consensus here im asking who you like 

TG: i gotta know otherwise im just gonna get you a framed picture of nicholas cage or something 

GT: dude. 

TG: yeah 

GT: does it even matter? it’s not like this gift is actually really a thing you’re going to get me. it’s bullshit just like the party. 

TG: no shit that goes without saying 

TG: but come on we gotta ride this thing through to the end 

TG: we are motherfucking entrenched in this bitch 

TG: and we gotta straddle it and really fucking dig our boots in and gallop off into the sunset 

TG: so spill the fucking beans bro whos your celeb crush 

GT: i don’t have one! 

TG: really 

GT: at least, i don’t think i do. 

TG: huh 

GT: what? 

TG: nothing 

TG: anyway i guess this doesnt really matter 

TG: you still want that jacket or what

GT: it feels like i just went through a lot of inane bullshit to get it, so i might as well, i guess.

TG: jesus do you think you could be less enthused about borrowing my clothes 

TG: thought youd be all over that tired cliche 

TG: come on i wanna see some excited jittering at the mere THOUGHT of enacting some romcom morning after stereotype 

GT: i’ve told you, i’m not into rom-coms! 

TG: tell that to sleepless in seattle 

GT: hey, that one was great! 

TG: yeah see gotcha 

GT: anyway, that would only really make sense if we were dating. 

GT: then me wearing your shirt or your jacket or something would totally be a big deal. 

TG: a big deal 

GT: yeah! it would be like… 

GT: kind of cute and romantic i guess.

TG: ok we literally just got done throwing you a hetero party but that was about the gayest thing ive ever read 

TG: and ive read every book and fanfic rose has ever written so you know thats saying something 

GT: wait, you have? isn’t she super private about all that stuff? 

TG: yeah 

TG: but you underestimate my ability to snoop 

TG: especially when it comes to rose 

GT: huh. is her writing good? 

TG: no fucking duh 

TG: but like 

TG: girl tends to lay it on pretty thick you know 

TG: have you ever read lovecraft 

GT: no? 

TG: ok well it is almost exactly like that 

TG: verbose and loquacious as fuck its like your eyes are wading through fucking 

TG: linguistic molasses or something 

TG: anyway uh 

TG: speaking of rose 

TG: i think she and jade are getting bored without an audience so hey check out that segue back into reality 

GT: yeah, i think you’re right. 

 

“I must apologise if we’re boring you,” says Rose, breaking Dave and John out of their furious typing reverie.

“Yeah,” says Jade, “what’re you guys doing that’s got you so engrossed in your phones?”

“Well, Nanna,” John says, shooting her a teasing grin, “I was just asking Dave if I could borrow something of his to wear since I left my sweater upstairs.”

“Sharing clothes now?” Rose asks. “Dave, why didn’t you tell me about this recent development in your relationship?”

John laughs at Dave’s long-suffering expression, before getting hit in the face by a soaking jacket.

 

In the end, Jade loses. She rolls a five when she should have rolled a six, and still comes up just short on rent when she mortgages the last of her houses. Rose is far too busy being smug to notice Jade slipping an extra card back into the box when she and Dave are packing up the board game—Dave snorts but doesn’t say anything when she grins at him.

Sometimes it’s just easier to let Rose win.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> words cannot express how much i hate formatting pesterlogs and how much i love monopoly (and also these kids)
> 
> *quietly steals some lines from canon and jams em in here bc none of that shit ever happened in this timeline and i cant just let those choice words go to waste*


	3. if you've never played strip poker with your two best friends and your sibling you're weak (and natural selection is coming for you)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhhhhhhhhhh this is rapidly becoming an exercise in how many summertime teen romance tropes + classpect/dogtier puns i can fit into a fic without it becoming illegible
> 
> (but hey we get our first kiss in this chapt??)
> 
> ((p.s. as of 22/06 or uhhh 06/22 for yall americans or whatever ive made a few small edits to dialogue and tweaked a few things. nothing overly important, just tryina make a smoother read. jsyk!!))

“This is... a terrible fuckin’ idea.”

 “Aw, c-HIC-come on Dave, where’d that… hehe, sense of adventure go?” Jade asks him, trying to swallow the persistent need to giggle that’s been plaguing her since somewhere between her fourth shot and her third glass of something bubblegum-flavoured.

“What sense of a’venture?” Dave asks, losing diction as his accent struggles around an inebriated tongue. “Rose is the one who starred all this.”

“Iiii’m nod the one who wanned to do shotsh,” Rose slurs, with a lopsided grin plastered across her face and an empty bottle dangling from her fingers.

“It’s th’ fuckin’... it’s jus’ the song, Rosie,” he says, gesturing half-heartedly at his phone, from which _Shots_ has been blaring on repeat for the past twenty minutes. “Ya gotta… listen, ya can’t argue w’ LMFAO. That band’s fuckin’ iconic. We’re a buncha dumb underage minors drinkin’ stolen booze, we gotta- we gotta do shots to really sell the whole, fuckin’ deal. Unbelievable.”

“So you’ll make us all do shots...” says John, swaying unsteadily back and forth with his eyes half closed, “but you’ll draw the line at… Spin the Bottle?”

“Come th’ fuck on, John, back m’up here,” Dave insists, trying not to be distracted entirely by the sleepy little smile on John’s face. “There’s a, uh, one-in-three chance tha’ we gotta kiss someone we’re related to.”

“Well, yeah,” he says, and Jade wraps an arm around him and pulls him in. He rests his head on her shoulder and continues, “But there’s a two-in-three chance that we don’t ‘gotta’.”

“But… c’mon, you could end up kissin’ me,” says Dave.

“Yeah?” says John. “So?” Then, before Dave can throw a little mental party, he adds, “It’s not like they have to be _real_ kisses or anything.”

Rose sends him a sympathetic glance, which he duly ignores. “Fuck it then. Spin the Bottle it is.” He grabs the bottle from Rose, who makes a face at him as he tugs it from her grip. He’d be annoyed by how childish she gets when she’s drunk if he wasn’t busy being absolutely sloshed himself.

The solid thud of the glass bottle on the rug is enough to get John’s attention. He rubs his eyes behind his glasses and swallows a yawn. For some reason, alcohol just seems to make him sleepy. “So who’s first?” he asks.

“Me, me!” Jade bounces excitedly next to him, and Rose giggles. It’s an unusual sound coming from her, high-pitched and almost hysterical. Dave grits his teeth at the sound. John thinks it’s nice to hear her laugh.

No one argues with Jade, so she gives the bottle a clumsy twist. Rose takes a sudden breath and holds it, but the bottle slows and stops several inches short of her hopes—it lands on Dave instead. He looks surprised, and his gaze darts around the circle as Rose recovers and giggles again. She pokes him in the side and he turns in time to see her waggle her eyebrows suggestively. He snorts. At least she didn’t wink.

“Hab fun,” she says, nearly spilling her drink as she goes to take a fucking sip, babe. “Get her all… ged her… get…”

“You can do it,” says John, biting back laughter.

“Ged her all… gedderall warmbed up fer me!!” she finally manages with an unsteady grin.

“Nyaw, Rosie,” says Jade, smiling. Rose hiccups at her.

“So, uh, how’re we doin’ this?” asks Dave. “Am I comin’ at you, or like, what.”

“Umm,” hums Jade, looking at John’s limp form on her shoulder. She reaches out with her free arm and gestures at Dave, waving him over with a flap of her hand. He takes a deep breath and leans across the modest circle, shoving the bottle out of the way and resting on his hands. He’s about to lean in when Jade interrupts, “Hey, no kissing me w’ your glasses on! Silly.”

“Wait—” he says, but she reaches up and though he wraps a hand around her wrist, he does nothing to actually stop her from pushing his shades back into his hair.

Rose laughs into her drink.

Dave tenses up, blinking in the light and averting his eyes from John and Jade. When he finally glances back, he flushes under their open stares. They’ve only seen him shadeless a handful of times over the years they’ve known him, so the sight of his bright eyes and dark lashes is one they almost revere. There’s a warm haze spreading over John’s face that he can’t blame entirely on the drink as he watches Dave swallow hard and shift in place nervously. Dave’s eyes are wide, pupils blown, and he takes a moment to register that yes, Jade is right there, scant inches away, expecting him to close the gap and actually kiss her, holy shit. Her eyes are such a wild, vibrant green without the brown tint of his shades, and they sparkle as she smiles at him. He’s far too realistic to hope that no one notices the heat rising in his cheeks as he hovers in front of her, but with the way his stomach’s desperately flinging itself from the fucking handle he doesn’t really care.

He leans in, eyes half-lidded, and kisses her.

It’s a shy, chaste thing. He pulls away after barely a second and lets go of Jade’s wrist, before pulling his shades down and retreating back to his place next to Rose. John doesn’t notice his own goofy smile until he tries to rub the heat from his face and drops it, bemused.

“Wh,” Rose splutters. “Thad was fast.” He ignores her, keeping his eyes on the floor and rubbing the back of his neck.

“John,” murmurs Jade, nudging him upright again with her shoulder. “You should go next!”

"What?” he asks. “Shouldn’t Dave go, since you got him?”

“Noo John, we are going in a circle here! That way everything is fair and everyone gets a shot at being kissed. Dumbass.”

“Ok ok, Miss Bossypants,” he says, and yawns.

When he flicks the bottle, it spends an almost excessive amount of time spinning, building tension until the tension snaps and flings off to crumple sadly in a corner like a forgotten rubber band as the bottle lands on Jade.

“So mush for being fair,” says Rose, and Dave shakes his head as he accepts another glass from her.

“Ya fuckin’ kiss hogger,” he accuses. Jade makes a face at him.

“Aw, leave her alone,” says John. “It isn’t her fault the bottle just finds her really attractive.”

“It ishn’t-isin-ain’t the only one,” Rose adds. Dave chokes on his drink when he laughs at the sight of her eyebrows waggling again.

“Put those the back down, Lalonde,” he says, and clumsily tries to hold her face still with one hand. He makes the fatal mistake of leaving his palm too close to her mouth, and jerks it away with a yelp when she licks it.

“Whaa’ happened t’ calling me Rosie?” she asks, and between his own intoxication and hers he can’t quite gauge how sincere her forlorn expression is.

“D’ya… want me ta call y- _you_ , Rosie?” Part of him registers just how fucking drunk he must be for this entire situation to be happening. That’s the part he usually calls his ‘cool and casual introspection’ but now feels more inclined to call it ‘a big honkin’ unfun party shitter who wasn’t invited to the piss parade’. He takes another drink and the gatecrashing introspector goes silent again. Which is good, because it might’ve had a few choice things to say about the way he goes still and hot all over when Rose rests a hand on his shoulder and leans in.

She hums something that sounds affirmative as she slumps against him, the hand that was resting on his shoulder moving across to the other one, and he fights a shiver at the feeling of her fingers trailing across the back of his neck on the way.

“Yeh,” she murmurs as her cheek smooshes against his arm. “Like it, when yoou… call me Roshie.” A messy grin makes its way across her face, all teeth and smeared lipstick, and he huffs a laugh.

“You’re a sloppy drunk.” He shifts her slightly more upright and slings an arm around her shoulders. She nuzzles into his shirt like a fucking cat before they both turn their attention back to Jade and John. Who are, actually, quietly watching them.

“Are y’all gonna kish—shit fuck, _kiss_ , or what?” Dave asks. The two exchange a glance.

“We already have,” says John.

“Yeah, he kissed me on the cheek,” adds Jade. She turns and sticks her tongue out at him. “Just the cheek! What is it with boys and boring kisses??”

“Hey,” say John and Dave in unison, and the girls collapse into muffled laughter.

“Mayyybeee the bottle likes you as mush as I do, hmm?” says Rose, and grins at Jade as she lays a hand on it. She sends the bottle whirling, and it makes two, three, four circuits before finally slowing and landing… on John.

He blinks at the bottle like he’s about to ask it for confirmation, but the sight of Rose waggling a single finger at him seems convincing enough.

“C’mere, Johnny-boy,” she drawls, and he laughs.

“Ok, but only if you promise to never call me that again.” He shuffles forward on his knees until they nudge her legs. She’s sitting cross-legged in a skirt, for some reason, but he’s been politely ignoring that—he’s pretty sure she’s wearing shorts under them anyway. He doesn’t notice the weird mixed aura of jealousy and rising excitement coming from the other half of the group, and Rose is far too hammered to be as conscious of her friends’ body language as usual. What she _would_ see, were she sober, would absolutely delight her.

Dave is tense and loose in all the wrong places, his shoulders set in a crooked line and his hands carefully still for once. He swallows around the lump in his throat and catches the back of his lip between his teeth. He, very quietly, averts his eyes from John and Rose, and makes uneasy eye contact with an empty bottle that had rolled off the edge of the rug earlier.

Jade, on the other hand, is almost giddy with voyeuristic enthusiasm. She enjoys the sight of John and Rose kissing significantly more than Dave does—she likes seeing her friends together, even if she can’t quite put into words _why_. Nor indeed what she really means by _together_. It’s just… nice! Familiar. The four of them being together feels _right_ in the most poignant of ways. It’s like the feeling you get on a cold night when you hold your hands over a blazing fire; the feeling of home right there at your fingertips with the vast expanse of the world at your back. A world you don’t ever have to face alone.

Admittedly, this is a little deeper than Jade meant to go in her drunken musing, but she probably wouldn’t change a word if she were to revisit it sober. She loves her friends. Always has. Always will. In a way, it feels like she was almost destined to love them. Like if you were to reach through the stitches in space-time’s fabric and brush against every incarnation of Jade Harley, you wouldn’t find a single one that didn’t hold the images of John, Dave, and Rose in some part of her heart. Okay, shit, that was definitely too deep. Jade stops being existential and meta to watch her two friends make out for a bit.

Dave looks back in time to watch John lean away, and the sight of black lipstick on his knuckles as he wipes it off his mouth is nearly too much for the heat under Dave’s skin and the thick, heavy feeling in the back of his throat. John looks… sort of unaffected, actually, and Rose is still her smiling, wink-happy self when they part. Dave watches her lick her lips, a flash of pink against black, and quickly looks away when she turns to him. Which is stupid, really, since his eyes are hidden and she’s too plastered to notice whether or not he’s staring.

Still. Force of habit.

“Whoose turn ishid? I mean, is… it,” she asks, and slumps against his side again. Her hand presses hard into his shoulder and he tries, and fails, to keep his own hand from winding around her waist. Her fingers are cold where they touch bare skin over the neck of his shirt.

“It’s Dave’s go,” says Jade, and taps the bottle impatiently. Her foot shakes and she bounces up and down as he leans forward and laughs.

“Down, girl,” he says, and as he reaches for the bottle Rose’s shirt rides up under his hand. She enjoys its warmth on her skin until he shifts it and pulls her shirt back down, absentmindedly. She gets as close to scowling as Drunk Rose can at his chivalrous bullshit—she honestly doesn’t know where he gets it from. Definitely not his MIA piece of shit brother, that’s for sure. Her mood darkens at the thought until the sight of the spinning bottle takes her attention. Her eyes glaze over as the bottle casts shifting patterns of pretty light into the carpet, and only refocus in time to watch it slow and point directly at her.

“Oh!” she says, a soft little sound of surprise, and looks up at him. He looks frozen, uncomfortable, and she seeks immediately to rectify this with a gentle hand on his jaw and a teasing murmur of “Daaaveyyy.”

He looks down at her, letting her move his head until his face softens and he covers her hand with his own. “Roosieee,” he echoes, mockingly, slightly more relaxed.

John’s trying to figure out what he’s feeling as he watches them—not really what he feels about the two being so… close, because he and Jade get pretty close sometimes too! Besides, he knows them well enough to guess that one of them is bound to pull a fake-out and goof around at the last second. So that’s fine, but… it’s the whole kissing thing. He just doesn’t really get the allure. The whole premise is sort of gross, honestly. Not that Rose tasted bad or anything, just like the drinks they’ve all been having and, oddly, like wax, which he guesses was the lipstick. He wipes at his lips again, and more black comes off. Ugh! He pulls the sleeve of Dave’s jacket over his hand and scrubs at his face, leaving lipstick smeared across the cuff. Kissing doesn’t even seem more fun when he’s drunk, and so far everything’s been more fun while drunk. He looks back up at Dave and Rose, and they’re still just staring at each other, their faces inches apart. Okay, now it’s getting sort of weird. He goes to open his mouth when Jade jabs him in the ribs with a finger.

“Sylladex!” she mouths, and he squints at her, because he can’t fucking read lips—what is he, a wizard? She huffs and shakes her head, pointing at the air above his right shoulder, and he gets the gist. He feels around in his hat until something hard vibrates against his fingers. He pulls it out, and unlocks his phone to a new Pesterchum message.

 

GG: sooooo????

GT: sooooo waht?

GT: i mean what*.

GG: what wass the kiss like???? :00

GG: i mena was*

GG: hehehe, WASS

GT: fine i guess?

GT: it wa shist a kiss.

GT: shit, i mean was just*.

GT: UGH im gonna turn m autocorect on!!!

GG: JUST A KISS???

GG: w rose laLANDE???

GG: slander! >:[

GT: jade, i cannot type like this.

GG: like wha??

GT: drunk!!!!! it is lawful!!

GG: consdiering our ages, it is anything but ;D

GT: i meant awful!!!!! D:

GG: neither of us can whisper john!!!

GG: we dont have inside voices!!! this is all we have!!!!

GG: see i turned my on too

GT: your what?

GG: thththt fuckin autocorrect john, keep up fuckface!

GT: oh, ok.

GG: wha where we talking about

GT: uh…

GT: rose?

GG: oooooooo yesss :))))

GT: do you think they are going to....um............finish the round any time soon??

GG: i sure hope not

GG: they are kinda of cute like that, dont you think!!! :D

GT: um…

GT: not reely? tt is sort of weird, jade.

GG: what do you mean!! i think its sweet

GT: sweet??

GG: yes!! they are both so needy its honestly fucking ridicilous sometimes

GG: but when theyre all drunk and like this they dont have all that sarcasm and bulshit to hide behind and they can just be happy and

GG: do TAHT

 

John looks up. At some point during their brief discussion, Dave’s shades ended up nestled in Rose’s hair, and John’s startled by the almost sickly sweet affection plain on his face. If earlier John and Jade had looked upon him with a sort of reverence, then the look in Dave’s eyes as he regards Rose is downright fuckin’ devout. It’s also, weirdly, sort of sad—torn, almost. John can’t think why. Jade has some idea, as she watches their faces grow steadily more serious the closer they get. Dave now, in fact, looks almost panicked. His eyes are wide and wild, shoulders drawn up to damn-near ear level, and she doesn’t think he’s breathing anymore. Rose remains intent, lids drifting closed and lashes fluttering as she moves towards him. Her lips part an inch from his and he finally breaks, chest rising sharply as he twitches to close the gap—and Rose’s mouth twists into a grin and she jerks his head down while lifting up on her knees to press a wet smooch against his forehead. John splutters into laughter.

“Haha, nice one Rose!” he says, while Dave gapes and stares blankly down Rose’s shirt with unseeing eyes.

Rose bursts into another round of giggles, falling back on her ass and releasing Dave. She nods sagely at the smear of black lipstick on his face, admiring it like one might admire a well-placed dart in a board. She even throws in a few sloppily pantomimed beard-strokes for effect. Unfortunately this effort is entirely lost on Dave, who appears to still be reeling.

“Diddai break you?” she asks, poking at his chest with a finger that is immediately captured in one of Dave’s hands in a graceless echo of their usual interactions. He blinks at her, finally focusing on something in this dimension, and his face reddens.

“Uh,” he says. He quickly pushes Rose’s hand into her lap, jerking away like he’d touched a red-hot brand. Neither John nor Jade notice the way her fingers curl on her thigh as he abandons it.

“So, uh, Jade?” Dave asks, turning away from Rose. His voice cracks halfway through her name, and he coughs and scrubs a hand through his hair to cover it. His eyes still haven’t adjusted to the light from the chandelier above, so he keeps his eyes on the floor and only glances between his friends in short bursts.

“Yesss!! My turn!” she exclaims, and leaps at the bottle. She hits it a little too hard, sending it whirling almost out of control across the floor. Rose throws herself at it and hits it back, clumsy fingers only just clipping its neck and flinging it off at an angle. Dave intercepts it in a blur, smacking it like his hand’s a champagne bottle and the actual bottle is a ship and he’s re-enacting that one scene from Shrek—except with less dragons and shattered glass and more drunken flashstepping and subsequent motion sickness. He splays himself out on the floor as the world lurches around him and the bottle goes flying in John’s direction. John, somehow, has the goddamn presence of mind to whip out his modus and catch the thing neatly as it tries to make a daring escape directly through his chest.

“Kobe!” three of them yell obnoxiously loud, and Dave echoes it weakly from the floor.

 

They end up abandoning the game, because they’re four drunken teenagers and the overlap between those categories lends the collective attention span of a dead goldfish— so, even though none of them really got what they wanted, they end up leaving the bottle to roll around in John’s sylladex and play another drinking game involving several stick-on moustaches and a late-night rerun of _Open All Hours_.

“The nurse is wearing one!” John laughs out as he points at the screen over Dave’s shoulder, where one particularly fetching moustache is positioned over Nurse Gladys Emmanuel’s face. They all take another drink, Dave sneaking one from John’s glass because his own is empty and Rose stopped passing new ones over around the time Jade curled up in her lap and started snoring. Dave’s in a pretty similar position—that is, up to his ears in Harleybert, sitting between John’s legs with John’s chest up against his back. The boy’s damn near cuddling him like a teddy bear, and Dave doesn’t think he could find it in himself to complain even if he searched with the mad scientist glasses Jade was using to paint Rose’s nails earlier. He glances over at them, the light from the TV casting odd shadows across their faces, and for a second they’re washed in grey and outlined in sharp, dripping ebony and his heart jolts in his chest—but he blinks and in an instant they’re back to normal. Just his two best friends sitting on the living room floor together. He scrubs at his eyes and curses quietly. He probably wouldn’t have seen that if he’d had his damn shades on, but they’re still replacing Rose’s headband in her hair and the promise of neither shades nor more appletinis could move him from his place right now to retrieve them.

At least they had the decency to turn the light out before switching to the TV, anyway. He closes his eyes and leans back further into John’s chest, resting a hand on his friend’s thigh and curling the other in his own lap. He listens to the laughter of his friends and the antics of the characters on-screen, and feels more relaxed than he has in a long, long time.

“Tired?” Dave starts at John’s voice, directly beside his ear. His stomach pulls some Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist shit with John a scant inch away, close enough to huff warm breath along his cheek as he chuckles. He turns to look, and even in the TV’s flickering light John’s eyes are as bright and blue and lively as ever. Dave quietly enjoys the sight unimpeded by his shades. He tries to keep his gaze from wandering, though, reminding himself through a haze of liquor that John can _see_ when Dave’s transfixed on his lips or whatever the fuck embarrassing shit he doesn’t normally have to think about because he has his fucking _shades_ , god _dammit_ Rose.

“Dude?” says John, and Dave snaps out of his stupor.

“Yeah no, shit, totally. But, whaddabout you, you’ve been yawnin’ it the fuck up like all night. Ya ‘bout ready to pass out yet?”

John hums as he lets his head flop forwards and rest on Dave’s shoulder. Dave blocks out a shiver at the feeling of John’s exhales washing against his throat. “Yeah,” John murmurs, and the warmth of his mouth brushing Dave’s skin sends a bolt of something hot and sharp shooting up his spine. He shifts to drape his arms around Dave’s shoulders, and Dave reaches up to clumsily lace his fingers through John’s. John laughs softly into his neck.

It would be so easy to kiss him. _Too_ easy. He could just say John’s name and make him look up and he’d be just an inch away. Dave could close the gap and take the fucking plunge and it wouldn’t have to end with an awkward brush-off and a mumbled excuse about the irony of fulfilling tradition—but, nah. Nah, it’d be wrong. Really fucking wrong. John isn’t interested. It’d be a total violation of the bro code, not to mention an _unreal_ asshole move; Dave barely entertains the thought for a second. He should just focus on the kiss he already got from the one person who’s actually capable of liking him (back). Unfortunately it looks like she’s already conked the fuck out on Rose’s lap, so really not much of a distraction to be found there. Besides, Jade seems a little too enamoured with her living body pillow to be any kind of interested in Dave himself, so he doesn’t pretend to hold up hope for that particular avenue for long. Which… hurts more than he’d like to admit. Damn, his thirteen-year-old self would be about as heartbroken as an emotionally stunted little kid could be—and, uh, his fourteen-year-old self. And his fifteen-year-old self. And his—okay, yeah, you probably get it.

So maybe he’s a little in denial. Or maybe a lot in denial. Maybe almost definitely a lot in denial. Like, denial times three. Denial cubed. The whole multiplication by triplicate thing is very important, is what he’s trying to say here. And some—or perhaps one in particular—portion of that three is significantly bigger than the others in terms of denial-to-size ratio, like, we’re talking the mass of the biggest fucking sun imaginable packed into this single segment. He risks a glance at the disproportionately dense celestial being and she meets his eyes like she’s been waiting for them.

She smiles, and her expression is soft and relaxed. She’s so different when she’s drunk, less highly-strung and pompous and dangerously… intelligent? (Attractive?) Maybe just less dangerous in general. Like this she’s almost defenseless, all her barriers and instincts lowered, her finely-honed edge blunted. Hell, if he was still a fighting kind of guy he might even be able to take her like this, but he hasn’t held a sword in years—and he goddamn likes it that way. The closest he’s been to an actual strife since moving in with the Lalondes is the occasional sparring match between Rose and her instructor that he sits in on, and the one time he’d nearly decapitated her because she’d snuck into his room at night and woke him up from a... particularly nasty dream. That was still early on, though. Back before Mom explained that no, he didn’t need to fight her for new turntables, and no, he didn’t have to hide food away in his room just to be able to eat.

Yeah. Pretty early on.

Rose blinks at him as John’s breath slows and evens out on his shoulder, and looks down at the snoring pile of girl in her lap. Blearily, she searches the carpet around her, running hands under the couch she’s leaning against and trying not to jostle Jade as she twists and scans the sofa cushions. It only takes a few seconds before Dave whispers her name and she looks over to see him holding up the remote. He guesses her intention and slowly lowers the volume. She muffles a giggle at the sight of John’s arms slowly slipping off Dave’s shoulders. He shakes his head and sighs, trying to keep John upright behind him before hitting mute altogether and setting the remote down to jab at his thigh. John grunts and Jade makes a similar noise as Rose gently jostles her awake.

“Shh, stay a sleep,” hushes Rose as Jade shifts and mumbles sleepily. “I’m jus’ gonna gogget us some blankeds.” Jade slips off her lap and Rose stands, rebalancing as the world lurches around her. She waits patiently for the buzzing in her head to subside and for her legs to wake up before setting off. As she tries to walk past, Jade grabs her hand and refuses to let go, so Rose finds herself pulling along a half-asleep Harley like a dog on a lead as she leaves the room and heads upstairs.

“Hey false alarm, man,” says Dave as John stirs on his shoulder. “Looks like Rose and Jade are on th’ case.” John mutters something incoherent and Dave lets him drift off back to sleep. He goes still as John shifts around him, holding on tighter until Dave couldn’t move if he wanted to.

 

Jade and Rose get halfway up the stairs before Rose realises that she is way too drunk to be flirting with Fate’s proclivity for echoing the early SB&HJ comics like this. She takes a handful of the bannister, still tugging Jade along after her, and carefully navigates up the steps one by one. The cold marble leeches the warmth from her feet, but does nothing to dissuade the heat growing in her stomach and rushing across her skin from where Jade meets it.

Her focus wavers between the sight of her feet on the steps and Jade’s soft hand in her own. Simple poor timing eventually, as poor timing often does, leads to a misstep at the very top of the stairs. Fortunately, Jade’s there to catch her before she falls.

“Oh, careful Rose!” she yelps, before huffing out a sleepy laugh into Rose’s hair. “Are you ok?”

Rose hums into Jade’s chest. She murmurs something that sounds very much like “Jade Ex Machina,” but doesn’t bother elaborating before wrapping her arms around Jade’s neck and nuzzling into her shirt.

Jade’s shoulders shake with laughter as she tries to shift Rose back to her feet and finds her entirely unwilling to carry her own weight. “Are you gonna walk properly,” she asks, “or do I gotta carry you ‘round your house like a princess?”

“Princess,” comes the muffled reply, and Jade’s responding laugh is swallowed whole by the endless halls of the Lalonde homestead. Such deep, joyful laughter is hardly a common occurrence here, and somewhere an olive is dropped thoughtfully into a martini glass.

Jade wraps her arms around Rose and lifts her completely off the floor, which is easy enough given Rose’s numerous bodily similarities to a bundle of silk-wrapped bird bones. There’s a quiet clacking sound as an arm of Dave’s shades, still in Rose’s hair, hits the arm of her own glasses.

“Soooo, your room?” she asks, eyeing up the halls, Rose’s legs swinging freely as she turns.

Rose mutters against her throat, lips catching on her skin. Jade’s next laugh comes out shaky.

“Is that a, ah, yes?” she stammers.

The next brush of lips feels more deliberate. Her breath catches when Rose very pointedly presses a light kiss on her skin.

“Thad bottle was, verry uncopopertive,” Rose slurs. “Uncoperative. Unco...perpative. Uncooportative. Fuck.”

Jade smiles. “Uncooperative?”

“Yes! Thank you Jabe. It was uncobopative.”

“Yeah?” asks Jade, humouring her. “How?”

“It was… remarkably devoded to, enforshing Sapphic abstibence. Yoou god to kiss Dave… John gotta kiss you—and me! And then, I had t’kiss Dave, but thad… Would’ve been bab, Jame! Or not, not BAD bad, because heee ish…” she giggles suddenly, “he’sh a good kisser. Or, he’sh… nice to kiss. Can’t rilly judge kissing prowess from a few seconds, I gesh?”

“What?” Jade asks. “You’ve kissed Dave??”

Rose mistakes her sudden energy as outrage. “No, no!! Id… I was, just making refference to how you kissed ‘im! Id was, a question. ‘He’sh a good kisser’... _quesdon mark_?!”

“Thaat sounds like an ouchrageous—fuck—outrageous lie, Rosie-posie!”

Rose muffles a snort into her shoulder. “Ok, ok, shhh, I haaave. Bud, it was… one time. In a dream. Doesn’ really count.”

“You kissed Dave in a dream??” Jade asks, trying to find a light switch in the hall.

“Shhh!! Once!”

“Oooonly once?” Jade teases.

“Yes. Only ones.” Rose sounds almost sad, which is unusual. “We were a, _little_ busy processing the realtitty of our inpending deaths and the fact thad we’d had been thororoughly played by an omnispitent cue ball man god." 

“Oh,” says Jade sympathetically. “One of thooose dreams, huh?” She knows all about weird dreams.

“Mmm.” Then, “Id’s a very delcicate balans, Jape.”

“What is?”

“The balans of what we know,” muses Rose, “and what we thot we knew. The balans betwin what we might’ve once had and what we _know_ we can have now. And, even if maybe onsh we thought we deserved to have something that was agains’ the rules just _one time_ , because the game itshelf was unfair and everyone ells was cheating anyways, it no longer applise because, the game isn’t real amymore! Or maybe, it wasn’t ever? Hasn’t bin. Isn’t real. But, I dirgress. Id’s a delitate balance because we don’t know what rules really madder. And, maybe b’cos we can’t tell watch ones are those we ourshells enforce?”

“Uh,” says Jade, having reached Rose’s room. She flicks on the light and nudges the door closed behind her. “What?”

“I don’t know!” Rose admits, looking up at her helplessly as Jade sets her on the bed. “It’s a philophosical ourboborbus. Ouroborbos. Ouro...boros. Hic!”

“Uh,” she says again, tugging the blankets and pillows from the bed. “Maybe we should, um, save the philso… phil-o-sophical conversations for when we aren’t really really drunk. Let’s… dial it back a bit, ok?”

Rose smiles, sheepish. “Ok. Whaddaya wan’ to talk about inksead?”

“Um… what'd you say the bottle did earlier? You used a _lot_  of words. A lot of very slurred, big words.”

“Oh!” Rose laughs. “It was…to leave the grashe of Greek poets aside, cogblogging. Wait, darn, cock-HIC!-blocking. It wouldn’t led Fate smile favorbably in our shared dirkection. Di… rection.”

“Right.”

“Howvever, Jane, I am of the firm believe that Fate can, jusht, absolutely shuck it. And given that we were, hic!, the ones sho blantantly affected by the bottle’s predujiceds, then we should be the ones to correc’ the astroshities we faced at its, its liddle glass appengages.”

“Yeah? How?” Jade asks, hiding a wan smile behind the bundle of pillows and blankets in her arms.

“I’m suggeshting that we, by roxy—proxy, I mean, have the absholute duty to restore balance to the scales. You and me should, HIC! should engage in that which was sho unfairly denied do us.”

Jade considers her for a moment. “So what you’re saying, in a super silly and roundabout way,” she drawls, dumping the armful at the head of the bed and moving to lean over Rose with one hand braced above her shoulder, “is that you want to kiss me?”

Rose watches her through hazy eyes and a lipstick-smeared smile. “Yez.”

“Rose,” Jade laughs, “you could have jusht—oops, just asked!” She leans in.

 

Dave stirs in John’s arms at the sound of two extremely ruffled girls carrying bedding into the living room.

“Holy shit, John check it out, Jade and Rose are back from the war,” he mumbles, the veil of sleep clearly not enough to stop Dave from spitting out bullshit with his usual alacrity.

“Very funny Dave,” Jade says, dumping her pile on his head.

“I know, I’m th’ funnyman in our group of ragtag mumble mumble,” he says, his words muffled by several inches of Rose’s blankets. He shoves them off his face in time for Rose to toss her own armload of pillows at him. “Oh yeah nice,” he gripes, taking one and swinging it at her legs half-heartedly. “For real, what took ya so long? The average trip ‘round the world takes eighty days and you were gone for a solid three fucking years. I’d joke that you were makin’ out but it’d have to be some pretty fuckin’ intense sloppy makeouts for ya to just abandon John and me all blanketless and cold downstairs this whole time.”

“Uh,” says Jade, but thankfully Dave’s attention is too captured by the promise of warmth and comfort and not waking up with the back of an arthritic eighty-year-old to notice the sudden embarrassed grins that she and Rose exchange. He sits up blearily, John’s arm falling to his waist, and takes stock. He and John apparently slipped sideways onto the floor at some point during his brief nap, and he’s glad no one’s really acknowledged his current state as the little spoon. He worms his way from John’s grasp and stands, various bones cracking and popping as he tries to stretch the kink from his back.

“So we’re just gon’ sleep in here?” he asks.

“That’s the plan,” says Jade.

They all survey the scene. The room is a mess of half-empty bottles and dirty glasses. A pile of cards in one corner is spread on the floor in testament to Rose’s short-lived attempt at playing strip-poker, and a bag of frozen berries lies, thoroughly thawed and probably leaking, under the coffee table. John himself is an awkward sleeping L-shape in front of the couch, now buried under collateral blankets and pillows.

Rose’s mom is going to have so much fun cleaning up in the morning.

Were Rose in full command of her faculties, she would probably make some attempt at cleaning the mess herself to avoid another round in their passive-aggressive war going to her mother, but she isn’t, so instead she waits for Jade to roll John aside with her foot before wriggling under the blankets and snagging a pillow. Thankfully, the rug is thick and plush and has never been used, so it’s more than comfortable to her drink-numbed body.

She is not, however, too drunk to maintain her games with Dave. He makes an unimpressed face at her as she snuggles up next to John and tugs his arm over herself, taking Dave’s place with a playful grin. Unfortunately, as Rose came to realise, she’d left him obvious space to retaliate—when Jade lies down beside her, he immediately squishes between them. Jade snorts as she rolls away to tug over another blanket and good-naturedly rolls back to spoon him, closing up their weird living room floor sandwich.

Then, “Dave,” Jade grumbles, “binder." 

He groans. “But _Mom_.”

“I’m serious, Dave,” she warns. “Take it off or I’ll captchalogue it right off your sorry butt.”

Rose snorts. “Take id off, Dav. If you die next to me, I lose a bet.”

Dave makes a face, but eventually he wriggles around and there’s the odd _pling_ of something being captchalogued. “Happy?” he asks them.

Jade and Rose both chorus, “Yes!” and even John hums softly into Rose’s hair. Dave laughs quietly.

Then he stops smiling. “Jesus Rose, your lipstick is smeared as fuck,” he says, eyes trailing over the mess of makeup across her mouth. “It looks like you lost a fight with a juggalo. And the price of losing was having him aggressively mack on you for like, four hours.”

Rose laughs and tugs the edge of the blanket up over her face. “Shhh,” she says. “No talk, only sleep.”

“Ah, I see,” he says, “you’ve dev-dev-fuck- _devolved_ to the Stone Age. Well guess what, I’ve got a gift for ya. A real fuckin’… real ass discovery—it’s called fire, and my flames are as sick as they come—”

“Dave, if you start rapping I will smother you,” comes John’s sleepy voice from behind Rose.

“We all will,” Jade warns.

Rose nods, her eyes brimming with sincerity. She pulls the blanket off her face to mouth,“They all will,” at Dave, and again his gaze darts down to her lips. In the dim light of the TV, he brings a hand up to clumsily wipe the lipstick from her skin. If the light was brighter, he’d see the way it’s smeared all the way down the hollow of her throat, rimming gentle teeth marks and light bruises. If the light was brighter, and Rose more sober, she’d notice that his eyes are very carefully filled with no emotion at all.

As it is, she only smiles as he gently brushes a thumb around her lips and wipes the lipstick off on a blanket. He takes his sweet time about it, and she drifts off with the heat of his hand on her mouth and the John's warmth at her back. She and Jade are holding hands over Dave, under the blankets, and somehow Dave’s wormed his way under John’s arm with her. Jade’s slung a leg over Dave’s thigh and that is bound to get uncomfortable at some point—but for now it’s kinda nice.

All in all, they’re completely tangled together in an irreparable mess of blankets and limbs and heat and hair (mostly Jade’s). It’s... sort of terrible? One of Rose’s arms is shoved up between her and Dave at an awkward angle, and one of John’s knees is digging into her calf. The hand she’s sharing with Jade has already fallen asleep over Dave’s hip, and Jade’s entire arm is pins and needles beneath the pillows that the three of them are sharing. Dave’s pretty sure he’s sleeping on most of Jade’s hair, which is going to be a problem when she needs to get up, and Jade has a sneaking suspicion that a drink John spilled into the rug earlier is seeping into her shirt.

None of them would move for the world.

The four of them together feels… nice. It feels good. It feels… what was the word Jade used earlier? Oh, yeah. Right.

It feels right.

 

Right is not the word Rose would use to describe her feelings when she wakes up several hours later with a raging headache and a body that seems like it wants to kill her from the inside. She swears that her very skeleton is trying to claw its way through her flesh, that her skull is attempting to both implode and explode simultaneously. The storm burning in the hollow of her temples is unrelenting, unwavering.

John sits up behind her and says, “Haha, I feel like shit.”

Against her better judgement, she opens her eyes. Wow. Would you look at that. Suddenly Rose understands intimately how it would feel to have knitting needles jammed into her sockets as the light from the windows innocently filters in and then goes straight for her optic nerve. Dave can’t be enjoying this, especially given Rose’s vague memory of leaving his shades on her bed upstairs.

Speak of the Devil and apparently he will groan. At some point during the night, Dave must have rolled over to face Jade. Rose finds herself staring at the back of his head before he tries to physically merge the front of it with a pillow. He really needs to bleach his roots. He groans again and Jade stirs, opening her eyes and scrubbing at them with a hand before uncaptchaloguing her glasses and sliding them on. Rose barely suppresses a pained groan of her own as she realises that Jade’s face is still smeared with her lipstick. That’s going to be a fun conversation. Rose hopes she can avoid it as easily as she’s avoiding eye contact with her.

“Fuck… _me_ ,” Dave groans, his voice muffled by the loving embrace of memory foam.

“Maybe later,” Rose mutters, but regrets the words the moment they escape her. It’s far too early for their usual acerbic acrobatics, and she almost sounds sincere.

“No thanks,” John says cheerfully. He rolls away, getting to his feet and yawning. Rose scowls at the sudden cold on her back and tucks the blanket around herself to cover his absence. As he leaves the room, probably heading for the bathroom, Jade gets up. Rose continues her embarrassed observation of everything in the living room that isn’t the very tall girl stretching in the middle of it. As she sits up and lets the world lurch around her like space around a gyroscope, Jade leans over the couch and tugs the drapes across the window, sending the room into darkness.

“Thank you, Jade,” Rose says with relief. She rubs her eyes. “I believe I left Dave’s shades—”

“Upstairs, yeah you did,” Jade says, her voice open and amiable, but also deliberate and even, like an optimistic ice skater testing out the surface of a frozen lake.

“You _what_?” Dave interjects, turning his head and grimacing at her with a single, bright-red eye over the slope of the pillow. “Rose, Jesus fuck, you’re—” the heat in his tone dissipates suddenly, as that eye traces the curve of her neck and catches on its lipstick-rimmed embellishments, “—unbelievable.”

“Yes, well.” Rose chooses her words carefully. “It was a momentary lapse in judgement. I didn’t consider the possible repercussions at the time.” She clears her throat. “It was a decision I would not have made so carelessly had I been sober. I… apologise, if it wasn’t what you wanted.” She keeps her eyes on Dave, staring blankly at a smear of lipstick on his fingers while focusing every other shred of her attention on the blurry image of Jade in her periphery. Is she responding? Jade’s clever enough to see the double layers in her phrasing—though, admittedly, so is Dave, and he squints at her through his hair.

“I’m sure he’s fine with it, Rose,” says Jade. “You’re probably overreacting!” Rose finally risks a glance, and sees her smiling. The knot in her chest loosens at the sight. “I mean, it wasn’t like you just took his glasses without asking or anything. Then you might have to apologise. But you didn’t, so you don’t!”

“In that case, I’m relieved,” Rose says, smiling back.

“Ok so if y’all are done using my shades to skirt around whatever the fuck conversation you’re actually having, did you seriously leave them upstairs?” Dave asks. “Because in case you forgot, sis, I sorta need ‘em so the sun doesn’t burn my eyeballs right outta my skull. I mean, did we forget about my photosensitivity here? Did we lose the collective knowledge that I’ll go balls-to-the-walls blind without those things permanently attached to my face?”

“You won’t go blind,” says Rose, rolling her eyes.

“Balls-to-the-walls,” he insists.

Jade laughs. “I’ll go get them.” She slips from the room, and a thick silence falls on its remaining occupants.

“So,” says Dave finally, sitting up, “you gonna like, actually talk to her for real about all that?”

Rose stiffens, then sighs. “I suppose I’ll have to, at some point.”

“What’re you even worried about?” he asks.

“I’m not worried—” she tries, but he interrupts.

“Yeah, sure. Something crawled up your ass and died, Rose, so what’s up? Thought you wanted this.”

“I- I did. I mean, I do. But, ah,” she says, trying not to flounder, “I didn’t quite mean to make my advances known while ‘under the influence’, so to speak. It was indelicate. Clumsy. And besides, I…” She trails off, looking at him quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says, and it’s like she wasn’t even trying to be convincing.

“Oh yeah, I’ll buy that,” he says, shaking his head. Then, in a rare show of open affection, he gently takes her hand. She’s forced to throw a good portion of her self-control into keeping her breathing steady, as her heart kicks up the tempo and threatens to breach the cage of her ribs. She curses the involuntary heat that blooms up her throat and flowers in her cheeks as he brushes a thumb over her knuckles. _For fuck’s sake_ , she thinks. “Hey, I get it. I know you, Rose,” he mumbles, seeming almost embarrassed as he watches her from under his lashes.

“You-you do?” she stammers, heart suddenly seizing in her chest. _Is this…?_

“Yeah, a’ course. You wanted to have some semblance of control when you eventually got around to sucking it up and asking her out. But drunk you is an idiot and rushed into things. It’s cool. She’ll get it if you don’t wanna take this any further for now. Just don’t do that thing where you shut her out to save face or whatever. Talk to her. I mean, it’s Jade. She doesn’t play games or fuck around with passive-aggression and shit,” he says, and Rose’s heart resumes a normal rhythm. She tries not to feel disappointed. Still, what he’s saying is true.

 She doesn’t quite know what else she expected from him.

 

About an hour and four showers later, they’re all in the kitchen. Dave and Rose are sitting at the counter flicking ibuprofen pills back and forth while Jade and John try to make pancakes.

“I can’t believe you don’t know how gas stoves work,” John complains again as he tries to catch his breath on the floor.

“I do know how they work!” Jade insists, “I just… sort of didn’t register that this was one.”

“That was a pretty sweet save though,” Dave says, idly catching another pill as Rose sends it shooting past.

“Yes, thank you for ensuring that Jade doesn’t burn our house down,” she adds, putting her hand down on the pill when he sends it back before flicking it over again.

Jade, in her infinite wisdom, had put the pan on the stove and turned the knob on without actually lighting it. John had realised it a few minutes later and vaulted over the counter to flick the damn thing off.

“I’m used to my cookalizer! I have no idea why you still use gas for cooking, anyway. I could easily build you a much better stove that doesn’t carry the risk of blowing up your house,” Jade says, rummaging around in the cupboards with one eye on her phone.

“Yeah think we’ll pass, I’m not about to live with a fucking nuclear reactor in my kitchen,” Dave says, accidentally flicking a pill too hard and sending it flying over Rose’s shoulder. Rose smiles and makes another mark on a piece of paper before getting three more pills out of the bottle and beginning the game again.

“It’s not a nuclear—” Jade starts, frustrated. “Never mind, I’ll talk to your mom about it. I’m sure she’ll let me.”

“Oh snap,” says Dave. “That was almost a yo mama joke.”

“‘Oh no she didn’t’?” suggests Rose, absentmindedly brushing her toes up the side of his calf. Dave nods and immediately regrets it as his head pounds with the motion.

“Maybe I need to take another one of these things,” he mutters, catching the ibuprofen again.

Rose shakes her head as John stands. “We’ve all taken two. You can take another two in four to six hours,” she says, reading from the directions on the bottle. Dave takes advantage of the distraction and flicks two pills skimming past her in quick succession, where they hit the wall and skitter off. She scowls at him as he smugly adds a line under her name on the paper.

“What are you two doing?” John asks, amused. Jade keeps retrieving ingredients from cupboards. Rose didn’t even know they had baking powder.

“Nothing that has any meaning or significance to the plot,” she says, and Dave snorts. He doesn’t bother getting another three pills out, but the tied score on the paper irks her.

“Plot?” Jade asks, and John looks over.

“Wow, why are you taking so long to set up pancakes? There are like, five ingredients or something.”

“There are...” Jade says, reading carefully from her phone, “actually seven! But Rose and Dave, your kitchen is ridiculous. Do you even have real food in here??”

“Real food? All our shit’s in the freezer,” says Dave.

“You keep your fruit in the freezer?”

“What the fuck is fruit?” Dave asks, and Jade laughs. He melts a bit at the sound. Then his eyes trace over where his sister’s lipstick had been only an hour previous, and a wrinkle makes its way between his brows.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” Rose asks, and Jade hums thoughtfully, closing the cupboards and resting her hands on her hips.

“Well, I found the baking powder, and the flour… they were both hidden behind a giant bottle of something called simple syrup. The salt I found in that weird cupboard over there—”

“Tequila cabinet,” Rose supplies.

“—and the butter and the milk were in the fridge, duh. But I can’t find sugar or eggs. Should I just use honey instead?”

“Well someone’s gotta,” Dave says. “We’ve got enough of it and those bees just don’t stop shitting it out or however the fuck they make it.”

“That’s definitely how,” John laughs.

“I still don’t understand what possessed our mother to purchase those beehives,” Rose says, getting up to search through the fridge. “I know the cultivation of bee populations is important given the recent uptick in the use of toxic pesticides, but in our own backyard? It seems unnecessary.”

“Maybe Mom just knows she looks good in beekeeper duds,” says Dave.

“If you could go a day without forcing me to add another note to the journal that will one day single-handedly pull Freud’s name from the ashes of discreditation, that would be great,” says Rose, frowning as she runs out of fridge to search. “Do you know if we have eggs?”

“Didn’t we use the last of ‘em on eggy bread?”

She snorts. “Probably. But it’s unlike Mother to falter in her aggressive parental duties. I thought she’d have bought more by now.”

Jade heads over to the stairs and idly swings herself around the railing. “Hey Mom!” she calls up, and while Rose sighs Dave keeps track of the seconds that pass before the clacking of heels fade in and their mother pops into view at the top.

“Hey Jade honey, what can I do ya for, sweetie?” she asks, already descending the stairs.

“Do you know if you have any eggs left?” she asks, and Dave’s head drops into his arms as Rose closes her eyes and rubs at her temples.

“Why d’ya have to say it like that?” mutters Dave, and his mother’s face breaks into a grin.

“That’s a helluva thing to be askin’ a lady o’ my age, dear,” she drawls, and Jade laughs. John hides a grin.

“No, I mean for like, pancakes,” Jade clarifies. “We’re trying to make breakfast.”

“What, Rosie-posie and Davey-darlin’ are cookin’? I better check them smoke alarms.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mother,” says Rose, reining in her impatience. “I believe John and Jade will be the ones handling the cooking aspect of this particular meal. Now, if you could answer the question?”

“Well sure thing baby, you don’t gotta get snippy w’ me.”

 

It’s eventually decided that their lack of eggs is something that necessitates immediate rectifying, so Dr. Lalonde piles the four kids into the large soccer-mom car she bought specifically for this purpose. It squeals out of the garage on wheels that haven’t seen tarmac in months, with Dave in the front seat and Rose, the smallest of the three, sitting between John and Jade in the back.

Rose doesn’t make it easy. “Mother, explain once more why you couldn’t simply order it online like you do all other groceries,” she needles.

“Aw, is this cos’ you kids are too hungover to be headin’ out on shopping trips?” Dr. Lalonde asks, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

Rose bristles. “It’s nothing of the sort,” she says, now certain that the throbbing in her skull isn’t entirely the alcohol’s doing.

“So you’re just makin’ a cutesy fashion statement like your Davey w’ those lil sunnies of yours?” Dr. Lalonde asks. “That’s mad adorbs, babe.”

Rose weighs up the pros and cons of removing her entirely practical shades in the whiplash of such a polemic. ‘Fashion statement’, her ass. She’s wearing what look like dark-lensed versions of Jade’s round glasses, with battered gold wire frames. Her mother has, over the past six years, lavished her with no less than twenty-two different pairs of name-brand sunglasses, all of which are collecting dust in the back of her closet. This particular pair was plucked by Rose herself from the shelves of a dollar store. Sometimes the lenses fall out.

Rose decides to keep them on, if only because taking them off would hardly even the score. Besides, she could hardly be a decent host with a migraine.

Jade takes that moment to interrupt their feud with an inquisition about Dr. Lalonde’s attachment to their current oven. By the time she pulls into a parking lot, Jade’s offer to build her a completely efficient nuclear-powered cookalizer has been shot down with, “I just like that oven ‘cos it’s homely, y’know?”

“Oh shit Mom,” says Dave, “are you doin’ what I think you’re doin’?”

“If you’re thinkin’ what I’m doin’ is buying you kids some good ol’ Burger King then you’re right, sugar!”

“Fuckin’ sweet.”

“Dave!” she admonishes. “I didn’t raise no sweary McGary. What’d a nice normie parent like John’s sweetie of a dad think if he heard my son cursin’ like a totes angry sailor right in front of me?”

“Probably nothin’ since you didn’t raise me,” Dave says. “You’re off the hook, Ma.”

“Rude,” she says, and Rose rolls her eyes at the joking note of sadness in her tone. “I like to think my genes had somethin’ to do w’ how good you turned out anyways.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about my dad, Miss Doctor Lalonde!” John finally says. “He loves you, and he knows Dave pretty well, so I’m sure he wouldn’t blame you for anything. Or, I mean, he doesn’t love you, that’d be weird haha. But he likes you, anyway.”

“He _likes_ me?” she asks, coasting through the drive-thru with significantly more finesse than one might expect from a woman with a martini glass in one hand.

“Mother,” Rose warns.

“Lighten up, babe! It’s like you’re thinkin’ I’m some lonely lady devoid of any glimmer of self-respect. I mean really, who would flirt with the dad of their kids’ best friend? Not me, that’s who.”

“Thank you.”

“Even if he is a total hunk.” Dr. Lalonde cackles and lowers the window beside the speaker before Rose has time to form a rejoinder.

They end up back on the road ten minutes later, scarfing down some truly sub-par fast food and bickering about which radio station to listen to. It takes much, much longer to get to the nearest town, but they fill the silence easily, as they always have, and the ride goes quickly. For some reason, Dr. Lalonde drives right past the organic foods store they normally buy from if they bother going in personally, without so much as a side glance.

Rose is quick to voice her concerns, but Dave is quicker. “Ya sure now’s the time for a family-and-friends roadtrip, Ma?”

“Weeell, I figured, since it ain’t so often ya got the whole gang here,” she says, glancing back at John in the mirror, “that we might do somethin’ fun! You kids can’t jus’ bum around at home the whole time you’re visitin’, and Rainbow Falls don’t got much to offer in the ways of attractions. An’ I know we came in for shit to make pancakes, but you can make those whenevs. If that’s ok?”

“Where exactly are you intending to take us?” Rose asks, voice terse. Her lip is curled, and Jade frowns at the way her small hands ball up into fists in her lap. They relax when Jade places her own on top of one and detangles her fingers.

Dr. Lalonde hums. “The aquarium, for starters. They got some more cute cephalopods in just last week. I know you’ll like that, Rosie. Then maybe after we can hit up the museum. I heard they got some new fossil exhibits in recently that you ain’t seen yet,” she says, smiling at Dave. “An’ you might like some o’ the other new ones too, Johnny! They got a grant from a totes mysterious sponsor for a whole entire wing on cryptozoology to be built.”

John just about jumps out of his seat. “Really?? Wow, what’ve they got?”

Dr. Lalonde is about to answer, but Rose interjects. “We aren’t quite dressed appropriately, Mother. Had you bothered to inform us of this little flight of fancy of yours, we might have been better prepared.” Though her words are unduly acerbic, she has a point. The four of them are all, as teenagers on a two-week-long sleepover are wont to, still in their pajamas. Jade, in her floor-length golden nightie and bare feet, Rose in a faded red flannel set she may or may not have stolen from Dave’s wardrobe, John in mismatched grey sweats and a Star Wars shirt, and Dave in red trackpants and a purple singlet—which may also have been purloined from his sibling.

“Then we’ll go clothes shoppin’!!” Dr. Lalonde exclaims, throwing the car into a sudden jolting U-turn. “Think there was a cute lookin’ thrift shop back here somewhere—you like thrift shops, right, Rosie?”

“A’ course she does, who doesn’t?” Dave says quickly, turning to look at her over his shades. His eyes are unimpressed, brows knitted together and lips slanted in an expression that translates roughly to, ‘why’re ya bein’ such a hardass? calm down.’

She glares back, equally unimpressed, before John jolts her out of it by poking her in the side. “Calm down,” he says, and she’s taken aback by the severity in his gaze. “This’ll be fun! Don’t tell me you’re not excited for that cryptozoology wing, Rose.” His expression brightens suddenly, like the sun breaking through clouds, and she’s startled into smiling back.

“That’s more like it,” says Jade, and Rose turns to find herself entirely surrounded by grinning idiots. She tries to tug her hand free to fold her arms across her chest, but Jade’s grip is iron and her unusually large canines bared, and her cousin takes Rose’s other hand where it clutches at the fabric of her (Dave’s) pants.

She endures this for a few minutes, struggling against the combined force of their sunny dispositions, before sighing in defeat. “Field trip it is, then.”

 Her mom cheers in the front seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me @ my hands: dont make this into a rose character study fic dont make this into a rose—  
> my hands: beta mom lalonde interactions? drunk rose? passive-aggression? mind games? jaderose? daverose? rose's emotional reticence? rose's issues with romance? rose's inability to handle losing? rose dealing with the dregs of an alt-timeline version of herself? rose?
> 
> um i swear i have plans for some fun stuff next chapt, by which i mean, i know there is the potential for fun things to happen at the fucking thrift store, aquarium, and museum...............god forgive me i feel like this fic is terrible i'm honestly so sorry. see you in a month


	4. shopping is cool (when i'm with you it's even better)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it has been. far more than a month. here's 5000 words of self-indulgent filler while i begin on the museum arc

Dr. Lalonde pulls up in front of some boutique-looking thrift store. She hangs over Dave’s seat as he slides out, and flicks him a hot pink credit card.

"Go wild, kids,” she says to the four standing on the curb, “I’m gon’ do a lil’ shopping of my own—text me when you’re done, kay?”

“Bye Mom!” Jade says, beaming. She and John wave as Dr. Lalonde drives off in a cloud of screeching tires and motherly perfumes. Rose and Dave are already making their way inside. It’s cold in there, the AC cranked until both of them are shivering by the time the other two join them.

“Fuck, why is it colder than Santa’s asscrack in here?” Dave complains, and John swings an arm over his shoulders with a grin.

“Maybe we should find a shitty Christmas sweater to warm you up,” he says, and they wander over to the holiday section while Dave complains about how hard it is to find bad Hanukkah sweaters.

Rose and Jade, meanwhile, amble down the aisles of the women's section.

“What do you think you’ll get?” asks Jade, watching as John tries unsuccessfully to dunk an oversized Naruto hoodie over Dave’s head. Rose keeps her eyes on the clothes as she thumbs through hangers, barely giving each garment a once-over before flicking to the next.

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “I’m not really in the shopping mood. I had expected to be home by now, nursing my comedically exaggerated hangover with a plate of pancakes in my lap.”

“We can always have them later,” says Jade. “But,” she adds thoughtfully, “I know this isn’t about the pancakes.”

“Oh no, Jade,” says Rose, gentle ribbing clear in her tone, “I’m stricken with a sense of profound loss over our inadvertent lack of floury omelettes. As we speak I’m choking back tears. I’m able to maintain my composure only through sheer force of will and the delightful distraction of your company.”

Jade makes a face that Rose, bent over the clothing racks, doesn’t see so much as feel. The calm heat of neutral disapproval bores into the back of her head with undisputed fervour. “You know, we don’t have to go out if you don’t want to.”

Rose freezes. “Uh—” she starts, panicked.

“I mean, we can always go into the city tomorrow, or next week. This doesn’t have to be some silly turn in the game you’re playing with your mom.” Rose relaxes, her sigh of relief deep but inaudible. “Like, that’s totally fine! If you wanna do this to humour her or something, that’s ok, but I want you to have fun?” Jade puts a hand on her shoulder and smiles down at her. “While me and John are here, we should do stuff that makes everyone happy! If you’re really not in the mood to hang out in town, we can go home.”

Rose leans into the touch and gives up her farce of looking blindly through clothes. “No, no. It’s fine. You’re right—I shouldn’t let my mother spoil my time with you and John.”

“That’s not really what I meant, but um, ok?” Jade is interrupted by the stern sound of someone clearing their throat behind her. She jumps out of the way and tucks herself behind Rose, letting the short elderly person squeeze past. “Sorry!” she chirps, in a voice several octaves higher than her norm. “And hmm, hey Rose?”

“Mmm?”

“If you don’t wanna buy any clothes, why don’t we just stay in our pajamas? There isn’t a dress code at the aquarium, is there?”

Rose looks at her, something dawning across her face. “Jade, you realise that this outing isn’t just some well-meaning gesture from my mother. She has meetings scheduled today with some of the most important authority figures in the scientific community—to which both the aquarium and museum will be playing host. She will, no doubt, introduce myself and Dave as her children, so any misstep in demeanour or presentation will reflect poorly on her.”

“Oh,” says Jade, her jubilation fading. “So you’re saying you should find a suit?”

“No, Jade.” Rose smiles, dark excitement blooming in her face. She reaches up and takes her by the shoulders. “I’m saying you’re a genius.”

Jade laughs. “Well I know that, but—oh no, I didn’t just help you one-up your mom, did I?”

Rose’s grin only grows wider. Then she looks away, her grip falling from Jade’s shoulders. “At the very least, we’ll need shoes.”

She starts to head over to Dave and John, who appear to be modelling some truly horrific outfits straight from the shelves, and Jade takes her hand as she brushes past. Rose squeezes it gently before she stops, needing to address something.

“Jade,” she says, and Jade cocks her head slightly, listening. “If at any time you begin to find the crowds overwhelming, tell me and we’ll go home.” She squeezes Jade’s hand in both of her own, making her sincerity clear. “Or, to a lesser extent, if you need to take a break and find somewhere quiet to rest, we can do that too. You don’t need to push your own limits for our sake. Certainly not again.”

Jade is lost for words for a moment, blinking at Rose. “I know, Rose,” she says finally with a smile. “I will definitely do that if I need to—” then she looks slightly embarrassed, “this time.”

Rose smiles back before she turns again and pulls Jade along in the boys’ direction.

  


Jade left her island for the first time just over a year ago in a plane of her own design—dodging no-fly zones and making the dangerous flight to Rainbow Falls at sixteen, with only her dog to keep her company. It was likely—almost certainly—Becquerel’s influence that allowed her to arrive safely, landing hard in Dave and Rose’s backyard in a flash of green light and narrowly avoiding a collision with Jaspers’ mausoleum, which had only been standing for a few months.

That was the first time Jade had seen another human being in about fifteen years.

Dave and Rose were already out there to greet her, standing aghast and nearly dumbstruck as Jade stepped shakily from her plane, Bec clambering around her, and _beamed_ at them. For Jade, the sight of two of her favourite people on the planet had been an utterly glorious one.

Crowds were another story entirely.

  


“So how goes the thrifting,” Dave asks as Jade and Rose approach, and Jade snorts.

“Not as well as yours apparently!” she says, her grin wide at the sight of Dave swimming in an oversized, floor-length faux fur coat. He’s wearing what seems to be the store’s entire collection of pearl necklaces around his neck, and, for whatever reason, saw fit to finish his ensemble with a pair of fluffy pink bunny slippers.

“It’s okay to be jealous of a masterpiece, Jade,” he says, “but you don’t have to try hiding it by laughing at my Sasquatch cosplay. You might kill John’s cryptoboner.”

John groans. “It’s not a Sasquatch cosplay, you shithead. Bigfoot doesn’t wear bunny slippers.”

“How would you know, John? Have you been to his mancave? Have you kicked it with him on a Saturday night? Until you’ve cracked a cold one open with Bigfoot I don’t wanna fuckin’ hear it.”

The dozen or so ties around John’s neck swing back and forth as he rolls his eyes and adjusts the ill-fitting plaid sports jacket he’s currently flaunting. “Whatever Dave! I’m just saying, how would he even get them in his size? He’s literally named fucking Bigfoot.”

“Amazon Express.” Then, “But hey, you know what they say about a guy with big feet—”

John makes a face. “Ew, dude!”

“—Big slippers?” Jade finishes, and Dave pulls a hat from its stand to doff it at her.

“Damn straight.”

Rose, all too aware of the disapproving stares of other store patrons, steps up to Dave and begins to slip the coat from his shoulders. Dave accepts her intervention without complaint, lifting his arms out of the sleeves and stepping away from the coat’s grip as though it’s a practised motion. When he does so, Rose closes her eyes and sighs; the fucking slippers _squeak_.

“Oh my god,” John says, face lit up with absolute delight, “you need to get those.”

“I would, but I dunno if they’d go with my whole general steaze,” he says, and neither John nor Jade can really figure out how serious he’s being. He looks self-conscious, and holds himself awkwardly, shoulders squared and hunched and arms tensed at his sides—admittedly, looking uncomfortable in public is pretty standard territory for Dave.

“They’ll go just fine—Rose and I decided we’re going to stay in our pajamas!” Jade says brightly, and Rose wants to grimace until her goddamn face falls off.

“Oh yeah?” asks John, shucking the jacket and ties. He takes a moment to make sure the lines of the jacket are sitting right on the hanger before returning it to the rack, and detangles the knotted mess from around his neck to hang them back on the wall.

Dave nods. “Figured.”

“Huh?” Jade asks.

“It’s a pretty good way to show up Mom,” he says, and the beads of the necklaces clatter as Rose lifts those too from his neck. “I wondered if you’d come up with it,” he aims at her, and she smiles as she hangs the pearls neatly from a hand.

“Actually, it was Jade’s idea. I did come to the same conclusion, though.” She walks to the counter and politely strings the ugly, clunky things across the hooks on a jewelry rack beside the teller.

Dave’s eyebrows rise above his shades a fraction as he looks to Jade, and Rose rejoins them just as he remarks, “Damn, careful Harley. If Rose sees you encroaching too far on her mind game territory you’ll end up on her hit list.”

Jade makes a face. “I didn’t really mean for it to be a mind game. I just thought it’d be fun if our little slumber party went on a tour!” She then smiles sweetly at Rose, an expression that Rose returns quietly.

“So we’re not getting anything from here?” John asks, and Jade shakes her head, the motion sending her hair shimmying in waves over her shoulders.

“No clothes! But Rose said we’ll need shoes.” She takes his hand and tows him towards the wall of shelves that host the store’s selection of footwear. Dave goes to follow, but hesitates when Rose remains motionless at his side, watching him.

“I got something on my face?” he asks, knowing very well that isn’t the case, but getting angsty under her level gaze.

“Your arms,” she says, and the corner of his mouth quirks.

“Holy shit, do I? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” He raises his hands, staring at them in horror. “Where the fuck are my shoulders, Rose??”

She snorts, then feigns a dreadful sorrow. “They’ve been a figment of your imagination this entire time, Dave, I’m sorry to break it to you. Your mind couldn’t cope with your facial disfigurement and we all agreed it was kinder to let you live in ignorant bliss.”

“You mean my whole life is a lie? Just a wild fucking ruse?”

“An intricately-woven tapestry of fictitious bullshit, yes.” They grin at each other for a moment, until Rose’s expression fades back to severity and Dave shifts uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” he says, mirth truly drained. “I know. Figured I’d just get a jacket or something to cover ‘em. NBD.”

She looks him over, eyes dragging on the thick, roped scars marring his forearms. He has scars everywhere, certainly; Bro never spared him the sharp edge of his sword if he knew he wouldn’t nick an artery, but the defensive ones on his arms are plainly visible in his (Rose’s) singlet. Even in the sparsely populated thrift store, he’s getting odd stares. Dave fidgets with the fabric of the singlet, shifting it so the neck sits higher on his chest. He shifts it again, wishing he’d put on a shirt that doesn’t showcase his binder like it’s a damn fashion statement, and Rose huffs.

“Come on,” she says, and starts walking, Dave falling into step behind her.

She heads towards the counter, past the changing rooms, and Dave asks, “So wait, what’re we—” He’s rudely interrupted as Rose shoves him into a stall. “Whoa, holy shit,” he says, raising his hands and backing against the wall-set mirror as she quickly closes the curtain behind them. “I don’t think we’re s’posed to be in here—”

“It’s fine,” she says, reaching for the top button of her (Dave’s) shirt, “the cashier was distracted by John and Jade asking for something. Socks, I think.” She nods at him. “Take my singlet off.”

“Your singlet?” he asks, his mouth working on autopilot as his brain turns to fucking mush with every inch of skin Rose exposes, gaping as she undoes several buttons in quick succession. “The fuck happened to mi casa es su casa between sib-siblings, huh? My shit is your shit, vice versa. Some real fucking, familial magnam-shit-magnanimity all up in here.” His voice seems to have reached its highest pitch when she’s halfway through the buttons, and she looks up at him, exasperated.

“Dave,” she says, and he swallows hard. “You’re familiar with the archaic concept of swapsies, right?”

“Uh,” he stammers. Then, “Oh. _Ohhh_ . Right yeah no of course. Fuck,” he says, the sudden tension leaking from his frame as he grasps the hem of his singlet, “you coulda made your intentions more explicit, Rose. Clear, I mean. Not explicit. Don’t need any more of that if we’re bein’ real, here.” He doesn’t know if he should turn away, but she really is just going ham through those buttons—the sight of the black band of her bralette (thank fuck she’s wearing _something_ under his shirt, but did it have to be so goddamn... _lacey_??) is enough to make his mouth go dry as she reaches her bellybutton.

“What?” she asks, looking back to him, a sly grin curving up one side of her mouth. Her pink, clean, lipstickless mouth. “Did you think I was planning to jump you in the changing room of a high-end Salvation Army?”

“Listen, Rose,” he says, and finally has to turn around as she finishes with the buttons because the sight of her—his _sister_ , he reminds himself, and then feels slightly ill—slipping the shirt from her shoulders is a little too goddamned salacious to handle right at this very moment, “you can’t just shove a guy into a glorified broom closet and expect him to stay chill when you start stripping without saying a word.”

He realises too late that turning around did approximately fuckall since now he’s just facing their reflections. Despite keeping his eyes very resolutely focused on whatever isn’t his shirtless twin in the small stall, he knows the exact moment when she begins to approach him.

“If memory serves correct,” she says lightly, and he meets his own pained gaze in the mirror, “I said four words.” She tries to stifle her grin as she reaches for his hands, still balled in the hem. “ _Take off my singlet_.”

He damn near sends the thing flying when he rips it over his head, and under the ghost of her fingers on his waist he shivers. She tosses his shirt carelessly over his shoulder as she turns to put her singlet on, and he doesn’t waste time tugging it into place. He’s been comfortable in just a binder around her for several years now, but there’s... _something_ in the frisson of the air in their little stall that makes him feel dangerously uncovered. By the time Rose looks up he’s already done, and at her nod, he pulls the curtain.

“Hey!” barks the cashier, evidently scandalized by the sight of the two of them leaving the stall together.

Rose has little time for pleasantries, however. “It’s fine, we’re siblings,” she says, flippant, leading Dave over to where Jade and John are each holding their chosen footwear. “Found something?”

“Kinda rude,” Dave mumbles, looking vaguely discomfited under the aggrieved glare of the cashier.

“Yup,” says John, holding a pair of faded blue Vans aloft, before leaning over to whisper conspiratorially to her, “Sorry, we tried to keep her—uh, I mean them, distracted while you were in there.”

“They weren’t super impressed by John’s magic tricks,” Jade adds, snickering at him. She swings a pair of plain red slip-ons back and forth at her side. When she and Dave head over to the counter to explain properly (and apologise), Rose takes that moment to wander over to the wall of shoe-laden shelves.

She looks over the selection with a calculating eye, trying to find a pair that strikes the balance between shoes that would embarrass her mother and shoes that wouldn’t embarrass Rose herself. Her gaze catches on two slippers that appear to be the twins of the ones Dave is wearing—and she almost reaches for them, inherent value of matching bunny slippers inescapable. She’s stopped when a squeak from Dave’s direction reminds her of the catch that comes with such a score.

Her mother would likely have found it _adorable_ , anyway.

Rose looks further. A pair of mid-calf cobalt blue boots captures her attention, then some green ballet flats. She considers, and shortly disregards, a pair of bright orange sneakers and one of plain grey slip-ons. After a few moments of careful searching, John steps up beside her.

“Found anything?” he asks, stooping to pick up a pair of blue ballet flats and two errant black hightops someone left lying on the floor.

“Not yet,” she says. As he returns the shoes neatly to a lower shelf, she looks at him. “Would you happen to have a recommendation?”

“Uhhh…” He looks up, and something on the shelf above him catches his eye. “What about these ones?” he suggests, pointing at a pair of white canvas shoes with thick platform soles. Relatively nondescript, but for the fact that someone apparently, at some point, has sharpied a bunch of skull and crossbone symbols all over them. The ink’s bled from the original lines in the most spectacularly shitty of ways, and when Rose picks them up to inspect them she notices that the laces have also been coloured in, with a similar level of tact.

A slow smile spreads over her face. “Perfect.”

With the platforms on, she’s just tall enough to rise up on her toes and kiss him graciously on the cheek. Admittedly, she still has to pull his face down to reach him—somehow he’s grown to Jade’s impressive height in the few months since his birthday—but considering she barely makes 5’4 in bare feet this is no new affair. She darts away before he can react and heads back to the counter to pay, and he rubs his cheek with a hand.

“What was that for?” he asks, flustered, and Dave, having returned from that embarrassing conversation, regards him sympathetically.

“Guess she liked the shoes,” he says. Then he looks at Rose, and at the pink credit card she brandishes, and pats his pockets in sudden outrage. “For fuck’s—did you seriously fucking pickpocket me??”

She shrugs as the three of them join her. “I rolled a nat-20 on my sleight of hand check, Dave.”

He groans into his hands and Jade laughs at him.

 

They pay for the shoes and Dave sends a text mother-ways—she’s outside within the space of a minute (miraculously), and then they’re off again. Jade, preemptively avoiding another debate over radio stations, hooks up her phone to the car’s soundsystem and blasts the fucking speakers.

The other three are a little embarrassed when they realise she’s playing their combined original songs. Once Jade explains the music to Dr. Lalonde she refuses to let them play anything else; any lulls in the conversation are filled with the twined sounds of piano, violin, and bass, and strung through it all is an underlying, pulsing beat.

“You saved all these?” John asks, leaning around Rose to question Jade. Jade smiles and shrugs, throwing her hands up with a blatant lack of shame.

“Damn, Jade,” Dave says as [another song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOkeFOkE7No&ab_channel=MrAnonymas) begins, “how long’ve you been hoarding this shit? I haven’t heard this song in years and I _mixed_ it.”

“Oh, oh, this is one of my favourites!” Jade exclaims, bouncing in her seat. “You two did a really good job on it.”

“I barely even remember playing that,” muses Rose as her refrain fades out.

“Hey Rosie, wasn’t this your ringtone a couple years back?” Dr. Lalonde asks. Then, before Rose can respond, “Oh it totally was! Aw babe, is this why you were so Miss Zupperlips when I asked you where it was from??”

“You _didn’t_ ask,” Rose corrects, at the same time Dave jerks in his seat and asks her, “You made it your ringtone?”

Dr. Lalonde flounders for a moment, before addressing Rose. “Didn’t I?” she asks helplessly, then shrugs and smiles, not meeting her daughter’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

Rose, finding no distraction from Dave in her mother’s antics, shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “I may have, at one point.”

“When?” he asks, and as her expression tips to irritation he snorts. “Damn, you are being a Miss Zupperlips about this.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Deetoo?” John adds, and Jade snickers.

“That was so awful,” she says, and they high-five around Rose again.

“Hey but for real though,” Dave says, “when did you make our song your ringtone?”

She purses her lips and shifts in her seat. “Not long after you sent me the finished version.”

“Why?”

“Are we going through the Five ‘W’s, now?” she asks, a mocking smile ghosting over her lips.

“Until you stop being so goddamn cagey about this, yeah.”

The smile drops from her face so hard it no-clips straight into the afterlife, and Rose grimaces again. “It’s really not a big deal, Dave,” she says.

“Then tell me why.”

“It—I,” she fumbles, “it was a nice song. I liked it.” She shrugs. “So I made it my ringtone. Congratulations, you’ve solved the mystery. Do you feel accomplished?”

“Super. You never told me you liked it,” he says, unrelenting. She wants to groan. She wants to roll her eyes so hard the lenses of her shades pop out for good.

She tries to focus the heat back on him.  “Now really isn’t the time to address your constant craving for validation.”

“Yeah you’re right, I’m glad we set aside that bi-weekly meeting where the four of us spend five straight hours praising me and my accomplishments. You really liked the song that much?”

“It—” she says, then, frustrated, decides to put an end to the questioning. “It reminded me of a dream I had.” She settles back in her seat and stares him down.

“Oh. Oh, cool,” he says, and backs off. It’s long been established, by means of not discussing it, that Rose’s ‘dreams’ (and Dave’s) are off-limits territory around other people. Even Jade and John.

Especially Jade and John.

Rose doesn’t know how much the two of them do, and has long since abandoned the idea of telling them—her embarrassing lapse of judgement last night with Jade notwithstanding. She doubts John would take any strange dream of his to heart, although she has considered the possibility that whatever glimpses into the other universe—or… previous universe, perhaps, she and Dave still aren’t sure—he’s experienced may drive his latent fascination with cryptids, mythology, and… well, yes, aliens. She’s pretty certain his father still has a UFO-Spotters bumper sticker on his car that John slapped on when he was fourteen.

She’d almost be ashamed to associate with him if she didn’t dream of aliens nearly every night.

Jade is another story entirely. As Rose understands it, these ‘dreams’ are visions, originating from some other version/s of herself—she’s received contradictory visions of similar scenarios, like discussing the deaths of her friends with Dave and then, the next night, seeing a sequence of events where they lived. Or watching John, clothed in his strange blue windsock ensemble, die at the hands of a winged black dog, then seeing him in another dream, alive and well. Now, Jade has occasionally alluded to similar dreams; certainly when they were younger, being a veritable cornucopia of unusually fortuitous information was sort of her whole thing.

Despite this, and despite Rose’s burning curiosity and the gaping holes in her slowly expanding dream journal, she has never asked Jade about it.

Perhaps it seems circuitous and counterproductive to avoid such a potentially enlightening conversation. The thing is, if the knowledge of this universe (or universes, as it may well be) stays between herself and Dave, they at least have the luxury of pretending that the worst dreams never happened. The ones in which Rose died, and Dave died, and John and Jade and Mom and Dad and the aliens and strange other humans whose names and faces have always escaped her. Slowly, painfully. Blown up or stabbed or decapitated. Burned alive in lava, turned to ash in an arc of brilliant white light. Beaten to death, riddled with bullets by a friend. Bleeding out on cold stone beds.

The dreams in which Rose dies and has to endure the sensation of her flesh tearing and her knees buckling and her vision whiting out are the worst. The dreams in which she watches others die, watches them meet her eyes as the life leaves them, are also the worst.

Dying is bad and awful and she remembers dying so, so many times.

But Dave remembers irrevocably more.

For some reason, almost every dream he has about this fucked up reality is just another version of his own death. The dreams are presented to both himself and Rose without context; without the thoughts or intentions of the selves these visions are coming from. But for Dave, most of them are undercut with a constant tension—some distressing pressure that keeps his alternate selves moving in circles and stepping over the corpses of the Daves that fucked up when they get in the way.

Then there are the other dreams, the real, actual dreams that are more regurgitated memories and deep fears from this life, from before he moved in with Rose. He doesn’t get those so often anymore, and when he does they stay between him and his therapist.

He doesn’t like the look in Rose’s eyes when he mentions Bro in front of her.

Point is, he doesn’t like the reality of these visions any more than Rose does. He doesn’t know what they mean, and it scares the shit out of him. The fact that a metric fucktonne of sorry alt-Daves were subject to such a self-flagellating state of existence that chucking his own corpse out his bedroom window was par for the course is fucking _terrifying_ , and Dave doesn’t know what he did to avoid it this time round—but boy goddamn howdy is he relieved. When he tries to express this relief to Rose, neither of them bring up the memories of grey skin and soft black hair and sharp white fangs flashing behind smiles that they both have—Rose especially doesn’t mention how sometimes her mortal eyes and hands feel so _weak_ in the absence of whatever her power used to be.

The former doesn’t stop Dave from relentlessly teasing Rose when he sees her sighing wistfully over the horoscopes section of a newspaper, admittedly.

  


The drive into the city is long, but it passes as any time spent with friends does; with ease and far too quickly. Jade’s playlist dries up about half an hour away, so Dave switches over to the radio and they amuse themselves by mocking the advertisements and singing along to the music. John surprises everyone by knowing all the lyrics to _Mr Brightside_ , and Dave surprises no one by knowing the lyrics to _Starships_ —although Rose raps along much louder than he does.

Jade, meanwhile, watches the landscape shift from thick forest to busy highway to towering, silver buildings and teeming crowds she knows she will never get used to seeing. She watches whole groups of busy people waiting at crossings and window-shopping, carrying bags and babies and holding hands, and _marvels_ at it all. There must be a turnover of a few thousand people passing by her window, from just a few minutes of driving. She takes in the sight with wide eyes. Dr. Lalonde waits at a stoplight, and Jade focuses on individuals, picking people out from the blur of cloth and colour and motion, and watches. There’s a person with tall black boots and short blue hair, cradling a baby in their arms and smiling as they speak on the phone. There’s a teenager in a plaid skirt and red sweater smoking against the side of a building, their eyes closed and headphones in. At the mouth of an alleyway a guitarist is playing, a hat set out in front of them. Jade watches people—tourists, maybe—taking pictures and posing with street art, smiles at the sight of two toddlers in matching dresses waiting while their parent ties a bundle of birthday balloons to the handle of their stroller.

When the lights turn green Jade jumps, startled, as a motorbike roars out from behind the van and weaves through traffic, vanishing around the corner moments later. She hums thoughtfully and wonders how hard one of those would be to make—her enthusiasm fades when she decides it wouldn’t be especially difficult. Still, driving it could be pretty fun.

Rose watches her grin at traffic and strangers, clearly enamoured of it all, and smiles to herself. The sight of the busy city streets will never enchant her like it does Jade, too familiar with the crowds and buildings to be so smitten, but she revels in the secondhand enjoyment and the little huffs of laughter that come from her friend every so often.

Jade is beautiful when she’s happy.

She’s beautiful all the time, of course, but her beauty is intensified when it collects in the crinkles beside her eyelids, in the dips of her dimples, in the bright broad slope of her lips stretched with an untempered grin. She’s gorgeous when her eyes light up, and Rose loses herself in Jade’s very profile until the sight is lost itself when Jade turns further away. Even then, the sunlight turns Jade’s silhouette silver, lighting up gold in her hair and wreathing her like a halo—and Rose is lost again.

It takes about another half hour for them to reach the aquarium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> exposition is fun
> 
> also the link goes to Derse Dreamers on youtube, a song that never fails to make me cry real tears
> 
> theres so much daverose in here dhshfdjfb im trying to balance it out we'll see how it goes


End file.
